Woolf in Space: Subversive Interventions in the Contemporary Spatial Constructions and Discourses of the Dominant Socio-Spatial Order in Virginia Woolf’S Fiction

WOOLF IN SPACE: SUBVERSIVE INTERVENTIONS IN THE CONTEMPORARY SPATIAL CONSTRUCTIONS AND DISCOURSES OF THE DOMINANT SOCIO-SPATIAL ORDER IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FICTION

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

RANA ÖZKAYA

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

JANUARY 2021

Approval of the thesis:

WOOLF IN SPACE: SUBVERSIVE INTERVENTIONS IN THE CONTEMPORARY SPATIAL CONSTRUCTIONS AND DISCOURSES OF THE DOMINANT SOCIO-SPATIAL ORDER IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FICTION submitted by RANA ÖZKAYA in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature, the Graduate School of Social Sciences of Middle East Technical University by,

Prof. Dr. Yaşar KONDAKÇI Dean Graduate School of Social Sciences

Prof. Dr. Çiğdem SAĞIN ŞİMŞEK Head of Department Department of Foreign Language Education

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Margaret J. M. SÖNMEZ Supervisor Department of Foreign Language Education

Examining Committee Members:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nil KORKUT NAYKI (Head of the Examining Committee) Middle East Technical University Department of Foreign Language Education

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Margaret J. M. SÖNMEZ (Supervisor) Middle East Technical University Department of Foreign Language Education

Prof. Dr. Fatma Meral ÇİLELİ Middle East Technical University Department of Foreign Language Education

Prof. Dr. Özlem UZUNDEMİR Çankaya University Department of English Language and Literature

Dr. Alev KARADUMAN Hacettepe University Department of English Language and Literature

PLAGIARISM

I hereby declare that all information in this document has been obtained and presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also declare that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and referenced all material and results that are not original to this work.

Name, Last Name: Rana ÖZKAYA

Signature:

iii

ABSTRACT

WOOLF IN SPACE: SUBVERSIVE INTERVENTIONS IN THE CONTEMPORARY SPATIAL CONSTRUCTIONS AND DISCOURSES OF THE DOMINANT SOCIO-SPATIAL ORDER IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FICTION

ÖZKAYA, Rana Ph.D., The Department of English Literature Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Margaret J. M. SÖNMEZ

January 2021, 286 pages

Virginia Woolf is one of the leading figures of modernism, a way of seeing and representing the world characterized by the period’s breakdown of social norms, rejection of outdated social systems, disillusionment and alienation. Keenly aware of repressive social systems and unequal power relations functioning in practices and discourses of societies in various locations or territories, in and through her fiction Woolf analysed and criticized her more conventional contemporaries’ ways of producing and representing physical and mental space. The notion of “social space,” as developed by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974), when sought in Woolf’s fiction reveals heterogeneous spatial experiences and perceptions, which differ in individuals of different gender, class and nationality. This study claims that Woolf’s novels lend themselves to a spatial analysis and they demonstrate and challenge the spatial codes and practices of dominant social systems that regulated the ways in which members of her society constructed and lived space, resulting in the idea that social space is heterogonous, multiple and dynamic, which is in line with the arguments of space theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan. For its

iv theoretical and conceptual framework, the thesis also draws on the work of Gaston Bachelard, who attributes the house with certain fixed characteristics echoing the rigid construction of physical and mental space by the status quo, to demonstrate how Woolf critically exposes a suppressive power system whose ideologies are manifested and reproduced by conventional codes of thought about physical and mental space in her novels.

Keywords: space theories, Virginia Woolf, Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gaston Bachelard

ÖZ

WOOLF VE MEKÂN: VIRGINIA WOOLF ROMANLARINDA BASKIN SOSYO-MEKÂNSAL DÜZENİN ÇAĞDAŞ MEKÂNSAL OLUŞUMLARINA VE SÖYLEMLERİNE KARŞIT MÜDAHALELER

ÖZKAYA, Rana Doktora, İngiliz Edebiyatı Bölümü Tez Yöneticisi: Doç. Dr. Margaret J. M. SÖNMEZ

Ocak 2021, 286 sayfa

Virginia Woolf, sosyal normların parçalanması, modası geçmiş sosyal sistem ve uygulamaların reddedilmesi, hayal kırıklığı ve yabancılaşma ile karakterize edilen bir dönem olan modernizmin, öncü yazarlarından biridir. Baskıcı ve otoriter sosyal sistemlerin ve çeşitli toplumsal uygulamalarda ve söylemlerde bulunan eşit olmayan güç ilişkilerinin farkında olan Virginia Woolf, romanlarında, daha geleneksel çağdaşlarının fiziksel ve zihinsel alanı üretme ve temsil etme yöntemlerini analiz etti ve eleştirdi. Henri Lefebvre tarafından Mekânın Üretimi (1974) kitabında geliştirilen “toplumsal mekân” kavramı, Woolf’un kurgusunda incelendiğinde farklı cinsiyetten, sınıftan ve milliyetlerden bireylerde farklılık gösteren heterojen mekânsal deneyimleri ve algıları açığa çıkarır. Bu bağlamda, bu çalışma, Woolf’un romanlarında mekânsal bir analiz yapılabileceğini iddia eder ve onun romanlarının, toplumun yapısını ve yaşadığı mekânı düzenleyen baskın toplumsal sistemlerin mekânsal uygulamalarını ve mekânlara yükledikleri anlamları ortaya koyduğunu ve onlara meydan okuduğunu savunur. Böyle bir bulgu Henri Lefebvre ve Yi-Fu Tuan gibi mekân teorisyenlerinin toplumsal mekânın heterojen, çoğul, değişken ve değişime açık olduğu fikriyle aynı

vi yöndedir. Teorik ve kavramsal çerçevesi için, bu tez aynı zamanda Gaston Bachelard’ın özellikle ev kavramını belirli, sabit ve değişmez özelliklere sahip bir şekilde kuran (süre gelen düzenin fiziksel ve zihinsel mekânı kurma şeklini anımsatan) çalışmasını da, Woolf’un, romanlarında, ideolojisini fiziksel ve zihinsel mekân üzerine geleneksel düşünce kodları ile ortaya koyan ve yeniden üreten baskıcı güç mekanizmalarını nasıl eleştirdiğini göstermek için kullanır.

Anahtar Kelimeler: mekân teorileri, Virginia Woolf, Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gaston Bachelard

vii DEDICATION

To my grandmother

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Having reached this moment of bliss after a very long and challenging journey, it is now time to thank those who have contributed to making this moment possible with their presence and prolonged support during this process.

First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Margaret J. M. Sönmez, for her never-ending intellectual guidance, meticulous feedback, continuous encouragement and patience. It would have been impossible for me to complete this study, had it not been her constant positive and nurturing supervision, and inspiring suggestions. She has always been there by my side since my undergraduate years with her kind-hearted personality and positive energy, and it has been another invaluable experience for me to write this dissertation under her guidance.

I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Meral Çileli for her supportive attitude, valuable and detailed feedback, and insightful suggestions during the preparation of this dissertation. She always built the courage to continue with my studies with her reassuring comments. I am really indebted to her for her contribution to this dissertation.

I am also deeply grateful to Dr. Alev Karaduman for her meticulous reading of my work, invaluable comments, constructive criticism and elaborate feedback. Her continuous support throughout the process was an important impetus to my motivation.

I also sincerely thank the members of my thesis defence jury, Prof. Dr. Özlem Uzundemir and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nil Korkut Naykı, for their valuable contributions, enlightening feedback, and comments.

I would also like to express my special thanks to the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) for their financial support under the

ix programme of TÜBİTAK BİDEB 2211-A – National Scholarship Programme for PhD Students. I am indebted to them for their support in completing this dissertation successfully.

I extend my thanks to my work place, TOBB University of Economics and Technology. I deeply thank amazing people who work and study there. In this respect, my special thanks go to the director of the Department of Foreign Languages, Dr. Taner Yapar, for his encouraging, supportive and helpful attitude throughout the process.

I would not be able to survive this compelling academic journey without the companionship of my dearest friends Ayşe Esra Uygun Atmaca, Burcu Kök, Elifcan Ata Kıl, Hülya Daşkın, Özlem Özbakış, Seda Musaoğlu Aydın and Şükrü Öz. It has been a blessing to be surrounded by these amazing friends who believe in me, encourage me to continue in my most desperate moments, and rejoice over my success as much as I do.

Dearest thanks to my family, Birgül Kahveci, Şenel Kahveci, and Ezgi Kahveci for their unconditional love, everlasting belief in me and support throughout my academic life. I would also like to thank my dear grandmother whose heart-warming affection protected my “daydreaming” in my childhood house, and who has always encouraged me and believed in me since then. Had it not been for them, I could have never achieved what I have done so far. I also feel incredibly lucky to have my other family, Füsun Özkaya and Utku Eren Özkaya for their blessing familial love and never-ending encouragement throughout this process. I would also like to express my gratitude to İsmail Özkaya, who encouraged me to venture into a degree in PhD by his great insight.

Last but not least, I would like to express my dearest thanks to Kerem Özkaya who helped me create this “room” of my own with his unconditional love and affection, never-ending support, great insight, deep understanding and everlasting faith in me. Our most desired experiences, dreams and days that we are looking forward to are what makes my moments of being and this space of world meaningful; life is a wonderful journey with him.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PLAGIARISM ...... iii ABSTRACT ...... iv ÖZ ...... vi DEDICATION ...... viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... ix TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... xi CHAPTERS 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 1.1. Overview of Spaces in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction and Non-fiction ...... 9 1.1.1. Urban and Interior Domestic Spaces in Woolf’s Writings ...... 11 1.1.2. Sickert’s Influence on Woolf’s Writing and Her Moments of Being .. 19 2. A THEORETICAL BACKGROUND TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF SPACE IN MODERNISM ...... 25 2.1. The Rise of the Notions of Simultaneity and Plurality of Times and Spaces…...... 25 2.1.1. Proliferation of Spaces as Multiple, Relative and Dynamic ...... 27 2.1.2. Einstein and the Death of Absolute Space ...... 29 2.1.3. Nietzsche and Ortega: The Philosophy of Perspectivism ...... 30 2.1.4. The New Understanding of Space in Natural and Social Sciences ...... 32 2.1.5. Radical Configurations of Space in the Early Twentieth Century Painting and Woolf ...... 33 2.1.6. Multiplicity of Spaces as Reflected in the Works of Modernist Writers: Proust and Joyce ...... 35 2.1.7. Challenge to the Idea of Space as an Inert Void: Positive Negative Space…...... 37 2.2. A Theoretical Overview of Selected Spatial Theorists ...... 40 2.2.1 Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault on Space: Space as a Social Construct ...... 41

xi 2.2.1.1 Interdependence of the Social and Spatial: Doreen Massey and David Harvey…...... 52 2.2.2 Space and Place in Relation to Human Beings: Yi-Fu Tuan ...... 54 2.2.3 Phenomenological Understandings of Space and Gaston Bachelard ... 62 3. REWRITING DOMESTIC SPACES IN THE VOYAGE OUT, MRS DALLOWAY, TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, AND THE YEARS ...... 70 3.1. An Investigation into Spatial Codes Attributed to Domestic Space by Patriarchy ...... 71 3.1.1 Disrupting the Equation of Domestic Space with Femininity, Comfort, Stability and Order in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years ...... 82 3.2. Creators of Space: Erasing the Invisibility of the Working-class ...... 97 3.2.1 Unsettling Fetishization of Domestic Space in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse ...... 98 3.2.2 Changing Domestic Living Spaces in The Years ...... 111 3.3. Restructuring a More Inclusive Social Space of Home/Nation in The Voyage Out and The Years ...... 121 4. QUESTIONING THE ASSUMED FIXITY AND SUPERIORITY OF PUBLIC SPACES IN THE VOYAGE OUT AND MRS DALLOWAY ...... 141 4.1. Challenging the Ideals of Peace and Humanization in Public Spaces: A London of Darkness in The Voyage Out ...... 151 4.2. Rendering London Multiple in Mrs Dalloway ...... 197 5. CONCLUSION ...... 235 REFERENCES ...... 246 APPENDICES A. CURRICULUM VITAE ...... 260 B. TURKISH SUMMARY / TÜRKÇE ÖZET ...... 262 C. THESIS PERMISSION FORM / TEZ İZİN FORMU ...... 286

xii

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

“Space is the everywhere of modern thought,” say Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift in their introduction to Thinking Space (2000), a book that investigates work on space by various thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Hélène Cixous and Michel Foucault (Crang and Thrift 1). Such a claim seems to confirm a prediction made over three decades earlier in “Of Other Spaces” by Foucault, that “the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (Foucault 22). In this regard, as Zink remarks, what motivated Foucault and other thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre to turn their attention to space was a change in the understanding of space from “a neutral container, a blank canvas . . . filled in by human activity”, namely, an “absolute or ‘empirico-physical’ conception which suggested that space can be conceived as outside of human existence” to the understanding of space as socially produced and closely connected with social interactions (Zink 14). Zink believes that Lefebvre’s claims that “any space implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships” (Lefebvre 82-83), and that “space is political and ideological” (31) have been quite influential in succeeding thought about space and the critical practices it has produced (Zink 14). As Phillip E. Wegner explains, this diffusion of spatial thinking and of the “vast and multiform research project” of spatial criticism result from work in a variety of fields such as social theory, history, geography, architecture, anthropology, philosophy, art, literary and cultural criticism, drawing attention to the interdisciplinary nature of spatial criticism (Wegner 180). In this regard, Wegner also touches upon the importance of integrating spatial criticism with our reading and understanding of

1 literature: “an attention to issues of space and spatiality promises to change not only how we read literature, but also what we read” (196). He suggests that spatial criticism enables rereading the canon as well as reconstructing it by exposing “marginalized forms and practices” (197). As Wegner remarks, what is significant here is the idea of coming up with new readings and fresher insights into literary texts. In this regard, approaching modernism – and one of the best representatives of modernist literature, Virginia Woolf – from the perspective of spatial criticism may prove useful in demonstrating the general breakdown of forms, old hierarchies and so-called truths which characterized the spirit of modernism.

An English novelist, essayist and biographer, Virginia Woolf is one of the most prolific of modernist writers who produced outstanding works which go against the conventional techniques of nineteenth century literature. As Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote in his obituary for Woolf, she was one of the best representatives of a historical moment when art was integrated into society, and without her “at the centre of it, it would have remained formless or marginal . . . With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken” (Eliot, “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary”). Her work incorporates the quintessential elements associated with modernist literature such as the stream of consciousness technique, free indirect speech, psychoanalytic insight, psychological interiority, multiple narrative points of view, and representations of characters’ loneliness, alienation and disillusionment. Her work is also characterized by a number of experiments which reflect changing perceptions of the early twentieth century in her quest for developing new ways to represent the relationship between individual lives and space under the pressure of society, and they are particularly interested in the experience of women. Considering her importance as a representative of modernist fiction, this section of the study will briefly discuss modernism and the modernist understanding of space before delving into an analysis of Woolf’s understanding and representation of space in her fiction.

Before these discussions, however, in order to avoid any confusion, it is of utmost importance to say that unless otherwise stated, this study will make use of Henri

2 Lefebvre’s understanding of space as a combination of three interconnected spatial concepts, challenging its long-established understanding as being only physical. Lefebvre’s spatial concepts are: “physical space”, “mental space” and “social space”; they are also referred to as “perceived”, “conceived” and “lived” space, respectively. Lefebvre believes that the production of space is more than just a physical act, since it involves the interplay of physical, mental and social spaces that are produced and reproduced through social, economic, cultural, ideological and political processes. While his notion of physical space, which resembles long-established definitions of space, designates physical form perceived through the senses, mental space refers to the conceptual or non-physical technical renderings produced by “scientists, planners, urbanists . . . social engineers” (Lefebvre 46). The production of space relies on these two but it is more heavily influenced by social space, which is strongly affected by our imaginations and is more open to change than physical space and mental space, which are mainly governed and maintained by the status quo. This dissertation will employ these distinctions between physical space, mental space and social space and it will specifically use these three sets of words (physical space, mental space and social space) for the sake of convenience and clarity.

A radical response to traditional ways of perceiving and interacting with the world, modernism emerged in the late 19th century and flourished until the middle of the 20th century. It flourished as a way of addressing in the arts the rapid and tremendous changes in the individual and the social experiences of life, space and time in the years prior to and following the First World War. It was closely connected with several long-standing and continuing factors such as the rise of urbanization and industrialization, scientific and technological developments, Marxism and socialism, theological scepticism, social mobility, and increasing awareness of the implications of psychoanalysis and feminism, all of which, as Henri Lefebvre points out, led to the radical questioning of tradition:

The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge, of social practice, of political power, a space thitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought,

3 as the environment of and channel for communications . . . Euclidean and perspectivist space have disappeared as systems of reference, along with other former ‘commonplaces’ such as town, history, paternity, the tonal system in music, traditional morality, and so forth. This was a truly crucial moment. (Lefebvre 25)

As Domancich claims, being paradoxical in its nature, modernism defined people and their environment “as fragmented unities floating over a stream of ambiguity, of wholeness and disintegration, of community and individualization: to live in the modern world signified to dwell in a space where, as Marx said, all that was ‘solid’ seemed to ‘melt into air’” (Domancich 4). According to Domancich, it was in this period of history that physical and social time started to diverge along different paths, and the established belief of an absolute and fixed social space was challenged by the notion of the uncertainty of a changing relative space (5). New technological developments such as the expansion of the railway network, radio transmission, automobiles, bicycles and the telegraph paved the way for the modernist conquest of social space: fresh ways of perceiving space began to be considered and put into practice in the production of social space. Social space began to be seen as fragmented, relative, unstable, dynamic and open to change.

Modernist literature thematised or explored this fragmentation of subjective experiences, space and time more than ever before. Modernist literature in Britain was in direct response to the social and intellectual developments of the time: literary fiction challenged the Victorian moral and aesthetic values, and became known as a complex and difficult art form possessing mastery over and developing complex narrative techniques. By employing techniques such as the uses of multiple focalisers with characteristic interior monologues (streams of consciousness), modernist British novelists revealed how different perceptions of social space and time existed within and between characters. As Harvey claims, the writer’s space of the psyche had been kept repressed for a long time because of the restrictions imposed by traditional thought, and the new modernist approach to time and space, which was characterized by relativism and perspectivism, was the first to fully explore and express a subjective and personal understanding of time and space. (270-271).

4 Conventional ideas of time and space were abandoned and changed. Modernist writers tried to render time and space exactly as they believe it to be perceived by individuals in lived experience, and this is the reason why they made use of simultaneity and juxtaposition (239). The modernist novel was written in a way that made the reader comprehend it “spatially” and “in a moment of time”, in fragments rather than as a continuum (239).

Virginia Woolf’s novels reveal the sense of rapid change characterizing the modernist period. Her letters and diaries show that she was personally sensitive to the politics of spaces and to perceptions of modern reality. In this respect, as Kern rightfully claims, “the most famous, certainly the boldest, claim about the general breakdown of forms was made by Virginia Woolf” with her assertion that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed” [n.8: Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” 115]1 (Kern 183). Woolf remarked that it was a dramatic change which could be witnessed everywhere, even in the kitchen, affecting relations between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children: “The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat” (Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” 115). Symbolically reflecting the disruptions of the time, Woolf regarded the prevalent sound of the age as “the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction” (Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” 117).

Characterized by a number of radical experiments, her work reveals the sense of rapid change in her search for a new way to represent the relationship between various individuals’ lives under the pressure of society and history, particularly regarding women’s experience. As Snaith and Whitworth claim, both Woolf’s fictional and her non-fictional writing are invariably concerned with the politics of spaces: national spaces, civic spaces, private spaces, or the textual spaces of the

1 Woolf, Virginia. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” The Captain’s Bed and Other Essays, 1924, 115-117.

5 writer: “The psychology of space resonates through her autobiographical writing, from the claustrophobic, Victorian rooms of Hyde Park Gate, heavy with tangled emotions, to the airy, liberating rooms of 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury” (1). They believe that Woolf managed to be one of the prominent writers of urban modernity, especially in its feminist articulation, from what was considered women’s room: the private, domestic space of home (1).

Woolf was keenly interested in portraying the relationships between places and individuals in her fiction, an example of which can be seen in Mrs Dalloway when Clarissa, on a bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, feels “herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere . . . She was all that” (129). She then reflects on the interrelatedness and interdependence of people, things and places, acknowledging that her individuality and life are possible only in relation to other people, things and places, and cannot be thought of as inseparable from them:

So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death . . . perhaps – perhaps. (Mrs Dalloway 129)

Throughout her fiction, Woolf consistently demonstrates how physical and mental spaces function as a means of social authority through processes which naturalize fixed boundaries as their defining characteristics. However, she also implies that an understanding of space can be reformed to promote difference and plurality. In her fiction changes in the experiences and perceptions of social space and place by different characters accord with changes in the relationships between the self and society, private and public, domesticity and otherness, and here and there.

6 As Snaith and Whitworth assert, the significance of spatial politics in Woolf’s life and works “has not been adequately addressed” (2). In this respect, my study aims to contribute to a restoration of references to social and historical contexts that were made within the novels and that have been frequently neglected by the shift to an “inward” emphasis in the analyses of modernist texts. This study proposes that it is also important to demonstrate how Woolf, who is one of the earliest and the most eminent representatives of the modernist preoccupation with consciousness and interior reality, spatializes her politics with the aid of devices different from those of traditional narratives with literal description of physical places. This dissertation thus intends to show how Virginia Woolf both exposes and unsettles dominant spatial dualisms such as inside and outside, private and public, home and abroad, and here and there; its investigation of Woolf’s practice focuses on analyses of four major novels, being The Voyage Out (1915), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Years (1937). For its theoretical and conceptual framework, the thesis draws mainly on the works of three important theorists, Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, who regard social spaces as socially, historically and ideologically constructed, dynamic and full of conflicts, which make them open to change; it also refers to the work of Gaston Bachelard, who attributes particularly the house with certain fixed characteristics echoing the rigid construction of physical and mental space by the status quo. Critically uncovering a suppressive power system whose ideologies are manifested and reproduced by conventional codes of thought on physical and mental space, Woolf’s novels suggest an alternative understanding of space as heterogeneous, dynamic and open to change, preparing the way to remould gender, class, national identities, social relations, and human geography. Before delving into how Woolf yields such an understanding of social space and spatial codes in these four novels, I will introduce the outline, and then provide a discussion of Woolf’s use and understanding of space in her works analysed by a variety of critics, and a theoretical background to understandings of space in modernism.

There are five chapters in this thesis, the first of which provides a brief discussion regarding how much Virginia Woolf’s writings draw attention to physical, mental

7 and social space and how she makes use of these spaces in her works. The second chapter will provide a theoretical background to the understanding of space up to the time of the modernists, followed by an extensive review of certain space theorists and those of their works that will be used in this study. These are: Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space), Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space) and Yi-Fu Tuan (Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience). This part of the dissertation does not make use of a chronological ordering of these theorists regarding the time of their publications, considering the amount of space their ideas are given in this dissertation.

The following, third chapter will focus on how Woolf challenges conventional ways of representing and conceptualizing private spaces in The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years. The first section of this chapter will show how Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years both expose and challenge dominant spatial codes assigned to private spaces which confine women by refuting the ideas that home is a maternal, stable, fixed and asocial space providing comfort to its members and particularly suited for women. The second section will demonstrate how Woolf establishes female spaces as created by themselves, and that she challenges previous practices by investigating the creation of private spaces by working class women, as well as by the middle classes in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years. It will explore the extent to which her reconceptualization of private spaces includes a broadening of perspective to include not only a previously marginalized gender but also an ignored social class. The last section of this chapter will point to the association between home and nation, and discuss how Woolf’s novels expose the exclusionary attachment to home and nation and the idea of a superior homeland or nation (which is England in her novels) in The Voyage Out and The Years. It will also investigate the ways these novels challenge such perceptions and the attitudes characters have towards their nation.

Following these discussions, Chapter Four will analyse representations of public space in The Voyage Out and Mrs Dalloway, through a focus on London and its

8 public spaces. It will demonstrate how these novels point to an understanding of space as a social entity (in addition to its being a physical and mental construct), which is subjective, multi-faceted, heterogeneous, dynamic and open to change, through their representations of public space. The first section of this chapter will demonstrate how The Voyage Out underlines such an understanding of space by portraying different ways of living and spatialization in a different land, and by critically demonstrating how London is infused with places involving boundaries regarding gender, class and nationality, which makes individuals feel oppressed and marginalized, and which, in this way, questions the practices that govern the so- called superior public world of men. The second section, on the other hand, will analyse Mrs Dalloway and show how it conveys London to the reader through different perceptions of characters, which change depending on time and distance as well as on their gender, class, and nationality. This chapter of the dissertation will also look for some moments of space in these novels in which these boundaries are overcome, rendering the notion of space multiple, dynamic and flexible. Chapter Five will provide a summary of what has been uncovered in the previous chapters, examine what conclusions may be reached from these findings, and point to remaining gaps which could be filled by future research.

1.1. Overview of Spaces in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction and Non-fiction

Virginia Woolf’s works are dynamically connected with the philosophical, political, historical and materialist issues of her time. Her works are a source of ongoing power and growing influence, increasingly read as a harbinger of a variety of issues and concerns. Over the years scholarship on Woolf has expanded to cover a wide variety of interests such as historical, cultural, gender, postcolonial, language, and genre studies as well as studies with other points of interest such as intertextuality, autobiography, biography, global reception, cognition, and ethics. Among all these areas of study, spatial studies are just one of the recent fields of inquiry concerning Woolf’s works. For this reason, according to Zink, investigating modernism and Virginia Woolf from the perspective of spatial criticism has until recently meant

9 analysing it against prevailing critical approaches, particularly a “tradition within critical discussions of modernism that privileges the experience and representation of temporality” (Zink 15). As Zink remarks, Woolf’s interest in conveying the inner lives of her characters and their subjective understanding of time has already positioned her among “Bergsonian” modernist writers such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust (15), which also opened the way to associating her “moments of being” with “the Proustian mechanism of involuntary memory and James Joyce’s epiphany” (15). Zink also cites a number of studies such as Lodwick Hartley’s “Of Time and Mrs Woolf” (1939), James Southall Wilson’s “Time and Virginia Woolf” (1942) and John Graham’s “Time in the Novels of Virginia Woolf” (1949), all of which focus on time in Woolf’s works, and she draws attention to the fact that such readings generally reveal Woolf’s preoccupation with the fluidity of human subjectivity, “showing modernist sensibility to be often alienated from the external world” (15-16). Zink remarks that this critical attention to time in Woolf’s work in the late 1930s and 1940s continued in the second half of the twentieth century as well, an example of which is the 1970 study of Harvena Richter who maintains that, despite Leonard Woolf’s claims that Woolf did not read Bergson, her idea of moments of being “resembles his concept of duration (la durée) in which time is qualitative, nonspatial, real, vertical, and always present” (Richter 39). Richter therefore finds a character’s experience of time in Woolf’s writing essential in expressing “the particular quality of that character’s state of consciousness” (39).

Snaith and Whitworth attribute the recovery of Woolf’s interest in space to “the rediscovery of space as a category in the social sciences and cultural studies” resulting from the work of Lefebvre, de Certeau, Harvey, Massey, and Soja, as well as the rise of postcolonial studies (7). Before delving into a deep analysis of the understanding of space as a category in social and cultural studies, they cite Joseph Frank’s analysis of “spatial form” as a feature of modernist fiction as an early study of spatiality in modernist literature. Frank maintains that modernist narratives develop through the spatial juxtaposition of images instead of through the temporal frame of chronological development, and he considers spatial form to be a means to

10 convey “simultaneity of perception . . . by breaking up temporal sequence” (Frank 231). However, as Zink points out, Frank puts emphasis on the formal characteristics of modernist fiction and their consequences for the practice of reading, confining modernism to formal innovations. Acknowledging both the weaknesses and the assets of Frank’s concept of spatial form, Zink notes that a number of critics such as Andrew Thacker have made use of Lefebvre’s notion of social space to “reformulate Frank’s formal approach as a new spatial project aiming ‘to understand how social spaces dialogically help fashion the literary forms of the modernist text’” (Zink 17).

1.1.1. Urban and Interior Domestic Spaces in Woolf’s Writings

As has been claimed by several critics, the new interest in spatial analyses of modernist and Woolf’s literature has particularly focused on the city as the embodiment of modern experience imbued with excitement, confusion and alienation. According to Whitworth, the notion of urban space has come to hold such a privileged position in studies of modernist literature that it has even been regarded as a criterion in the creation of the canon, enabling critics to determine the extent to which a writer could be considered “modernist” (Whitworth 181). Whitworth cites Woolf as one such modernist writer, who was admitted to the modernist canon by meeting this criterion of the use of urban space after years of remaining relatively ignored by this canon (181).

One of the early examples of critical attention to urban space in Woolf’s work is Susan M. Squier’s Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (1985) which examines how “the city as both tangible and symbolic entity” conveys the junction of space, gender and class by analysing works such as Mrs Dalloway, The Years and The London Scene (Squier 11). As Zink remarks, Squier’s study coincided with the beginnings of the “flâneur debate,” a part of the academic discussion of modernity stemming from Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire’s symbolic figure of modernity (Zink 21). The debate has drawn the attention of a great number of critics, including those who have investigated the implications of a possible female flâneur. Woolf’s work has been an invaluable source for such discussions,

11 due to its “representations of female characters experiencing the freedoms of urban space, from Katharine Hilbery [in Night and Day] to Clarissa Dalloway and to the anonymous figure of ‘Street Haunting’” (Zink 21).

Compared to this emphasis on the figure of the flâneur and flâneuse whose place was thought to be the city and public spaces, less has been discussed about rooms within the city (Shiach, “Modernism” 252). The privileging of the public spaces of the city over rooms indoors has led to “the marginalization of . . . the domestic interior” as non-contributory to comprehending “the experience of living and writing in the modern city” (“Modernism” 252). Triggered by modernist literature, interest in the interior spaces of the city as an important constituent of the experience of modernity has, however, grown in recent years. In this respect, Shiach investigates the importance of rooms in a number of works by Woolf and in Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson, regarding domestic interior spaces as “a crucial imaginative and social resource for modernist cultural production” (“Modernism” 255). She asks “whether we can read a political, an aesthetic or a historical project into Woolf’s representation of London rooms” (Shiach, “London Rooms” 51) and establishes rooms “as spaces of memory . . . frameworks for identity . . . sites of integrity and security and also perhaps of a more threatening type of enclosure” (51).

Other studies focusing on interiors in critical analyses of modernist culture include Christopher Reed’s Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, Domesticity (2004) and Victoria Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (2005). In his book, Reed reveals an inclination towards devaluing the domestic in evaluations of modernist art, which is in line with previous ideas of so-called mainstream literary modernism. He claims that in spite of the diversity of modernist movements in the early years of the twentieth-century, “high-tech design and abstract art became the look of modernity” following World War II (Reed 2). He believes that the main reason for this is that artistic renewal, as exemplified by the avant-garde movement, stood in opposition to the home through a rhetoric which was apparently anti-domestic, and which could be observed in criticisms of

12 Bloomsbury as overly-interested in domesticity, an interest which was not compatible with the previous, heroic ideal of art supported by critics of Bloomsbury (2-3). As Reed states, by subverting the view that modern art should adapt the home to new conditions produced by science and technology, Bloomsbury declared a new domesticity as the standard for modernity, transferring the values of home life to the public area in its aesthetic and socio-political schemes (5). As he also notes, “the roots of Bloomsbury’s group identity lay in a shared sense of exclusion from traditional domesticity,” and the formulating or even recognition of a kind of domesticity not only unconventional but also subversive (5). Reed’s claim has also been taken up by Victoria Rosner, who questions the idea of considering modernism and the domestic to be “antithetical categories” (Rosner 4) and who maintains that “the spaces of private life are a generative site for literary modernism” (2). Rosner considers built space influential in the individual’s conceptualization of inner and outer reality. Her discussion of domestic space leads to a consideration of the convergence between modernism’s interiors and the social and geographical landscape in which they were located. Compared with Rosner’s study, Wendy Gan’s study is a more comprehensive discussion of modernism and space, thwarting long- established private/public and inner/outer binaries with an expansion of the notion of “privacy” to include a variety of public and private spaces such as the room, the garden, the city streets or the car.

In Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing (2009), Gan starts her first chapter by making a comparison between Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf in terms of their fictional characters’ understanding of privacy:

Where Austen’s heroines understood ‘that privacy [did] not altogether depend on physical situation’ and tended to locate privacy instead within the inner and inviolable space of the mind, by the early twentieth century, the demands from women were, in Virginia Woolf’s famous words, for rooms of their own, for physical privacy to accompany and preserve mental privacy (Spacks, ‘Privacy’, 4). (Gan 20)

According to Gan, this shows the change in spatial awareness at the turn of the twentieth century: the “emerging consciousness of the role domestic space played in

13 shaping lives and behaviour and an attempt to refashion it for modernity” (22). Privacy for women began to develop a spatial dimension and domestic space began to be investigated in pursuit of physical privacy for women as well. Here, Gan claims that one of the earliest domestic spaces to draw attention as a place of female privacy was the garden, in which some women had the advantage of spending time in solitude. Gan notes that it failed, however, since the women did not have control over when and with whom they shared it. Feminists and writers such as Woolf therefore began to explore other spaces within the house such as the study, as possibilities. Demanding a study for women asserted the need for a more physical privacy and was a challenge to the long-established patriarchal spatial hierarchy at home. However, as Gan states, the desire for more privacy at home for women gradually became a plea for “the gender-neutral and not necessarily domestically located room” (22). In this regard, recognizing that a woman’s lack of personal time is a serious obstacle, Woolf offered a materialist proposal to women: an adequate income to have a room of one’s own in which a woman’s time might become her own as well (22).

Gan emphasizes the fact that Woolf’s interest in representing places in her fiction can also be witnessed in her essays or diaries, as could be seen in her Moments of Being where she cannot talk about her childhood family life or her move to Bloomsbury without initially describing the space she grew up in: “But it is the house that I would ask you to imagine for a moment for, though Hyde Park Gate seems now so distant from Bloomsbury, its shadow falls across it. 46 Gordon Square could never have meant what it did had not 22 Hyde Park Gate preceded it” (Moments of Being 183) (Gan 26). The influence of this dark and quiet house, Hyde Park Gate, filled with the belongings and members of three families (“the Duckworths, the Stephens and Thackeray’s granddaughter from Leslie Stephen’s first marriage” (Gan 26)) has also been pointed out by Hermione Lee, whose biography provides evocative reflections on the significance of specific places in Woolf’s life. She observes that “two first memories compete for precedence” in Woolf’s memoirs:

14 One is of waking up at St Ives. The other is of ‘red and purple flowers on a black ground – my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap . . . Perhaps we were going to St Ives; more probably, for from the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London.’ . . . At the other end of the journey was a house with as powerful associations as Talland House. But they were of an opposite nature: 22 Hyde Park Gate embodied darkness, solid objects, interiors, constriction. (Lee 34- 35)

As Lee states, Hyde Park Gate, in which Virginia was born and lived for twenty-two years with up to seventeen other people (including family members and servants), was “a tall narrow house, six floors high, with a flight of steps up to the front door and a small back garden” (35). According to Lee, Woolf’s “memory of her life here as a child became overlaid with later feelings” and when she utilized it in her memoirs or fiction, it embodied “all of Victorian domestic life and . . . the whole of her family history: ‘the place seemed tangled and matted with emotion’” (35).

As Gan maintains, Hyde Park Gate was a house of clashing and gendered centres which reinforced the Victorian ideal of distinct public and private spaces. There was a tea table, open to the family members, which Woolf called “the heart of the family” and over which her mother presided, responding to the others’ needs (Woolf, Moments of Being 118). The parental room was on the first floor described by Woolf as “the sexual centre, the birth centre, the death centre of the house” (118). Woolf’s father’s study was on the top floor, “the brain of the house” – private, distant and intellectual – controlling all the members of the house (119). Considering Virginia Woolf both modern and a late Victorian in that her Victorian family past entered her fiction, influenced her political analyses of society and underlies the attitudes and behaviour of her social class, Lee points to Woolf’s being shaped by the policies of her childhood family house. As Lee remarks, Woolf considered these clashing spatial economies of the house difficult to smooth out, and when she reflected on her family life, she visualised it not as a single uniform image, but as one which is marked by dramatic divisions (54):

Childhood was cut in two between Cornwall and London. An end to childhood came with the violent division made by her mother’s death. The

15 household was fragmented (as in To the Lighthouse after Mrs Ramsay’s death, ‘as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow’). [n.21: Woolf, 160]2 There was a historical divide between the younger generation – the four Stephen children – and the other people in the house, their father and the Duckworth sons, who were still, she thinks, Victorians: ‘We were living say in 1910; they were living in 1860.’ [n.22: Woolf, Moments of Being, 161]3 The ‘fight’ between the Victorian and the twentieth-century members of the household was split across, again, by the extreme, absurd contrast between the social life the two girls were being forced into by their older half-brother George, and the reclusive life of the mind going on in their father’s study. ‘The division in our lives was curious. Downstairs there was pure convention; upstairs pure intellect.’ [n.23: Moments of Being, 171] (Lee 54)

In addition to all these divisions, there was another division between the “close conspiracy” of the sisters who strive for a place for their own points of view and desires in their world of “many men” (Moments of Being 157). As Gan remarks, Woolf fluctuated between these two different realms of the downstairs world of the drawing-room dominated by her mother and the upstairs world of her bedroom and her father’s study where intellect was claimed to reign: “I would go from the drawing room, where George was telling one of his little triumphs . . . up to father’s study . . . feeling proud and stimulated . . . full of love for this unworldly, very distinguished and lonely man, whom I had pleased by coming, I would go back to the drawing room . . . There was no connection. There were deep divisions” (Woolf, Moments of Being 157-158). Gan believes that identifying her problem of never being able to occupy a unified space totally under her control, Woolf was able to recognize that “domestic arrangements, including space and domestic architecture, needed to be reformed to enable women greater control over their own time and space, to be, in effect, private” and she called for a room of one’s own (Gan 27). In this respect, Lee connects Woolf’s keen habit of reading from her childhood to her desire for a refuge

2 Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse, Penguin, 1993.

3 Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1985.

16 where she could find some privacy and where she would not be forced to share things with others:

There was not much privacy in her childhood. When she tried to think back, she found it impossible to disentangle herself from ‘those instincts, affections, passions, attachments . . . which bound me . . . from the first moment of consciousness to other people’. [n.77: Woolf, Moments of Being, 89] (‘Oh the torture of never being left alone!’ her mother was supposed to have said when she was widowed; her daughter was moved by the phrase.) Everything was shared: rooms, baths, walks, jokes, lessons, activities like bug-hunting or skating or cricketing or boating expeditions. All story-telling was collaborative. Virginia Stephen was reading avidly, from very early on, under the guidance of her father, and from eleven or twelve reading became her secret life, her ‘habit’, and her refuge. (Lee 111-112)

Acknowledging Woolf’s sensitivity to the gendered rooms of her childhood home, Gan provides a discussion of modernism and space by analysing Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in which she claims to discover a yearning for “rooms of hybrid function that provide the solitude necessary for contemplation and yet still offer a connection to the outside world and a degree of sociability . . . rooms with locks where the female owner-occupiers can police access to their private spaces, locking others out or letting them in” (42). She claims that the same notion of a room with solitude and a connection to the outside world can also be observed in the minds of female characters of Mrs Dalloway and ‘Street Haunting’ when they find privacy in the city, experienced by shedding their domestic roles and experiencing a variety of selves (such as youthful selves and stylish urban selves) while roaming in the city. As she maintains, for Woolf the city makes the hidden aspects of the self free, whereas home is where conformity is demanded. Therefore, Gan regards particularly ‘Street Haunting’, as a positive conveyer of the invisible presence of the flâneuse into modernist literature. In this respect, Gan also acknowledges that in Woolf’s works new technologies of transportation such as cars and trains provide women with more and easier access to public spaces wherein to seek mental and physical privacy and freedom outside. Considering all these points, it can be asserted that Gan leaves us with a quite inclusive study of modernism and space by extending the notion of

17 privacy to a number of public and private spaces, thereby overthrowing the binaries of private/public and inner/outer.

Another study which focuses on the relationships between the real and imagined spaces of Woolf’s fiction is Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (2007) edited by Anna Snaith and Michael W. Whitworth who compile eleven essays on topics such as the imperial spaces of London and the gendering of space in Woolf’s works. In their introduction to the book, they start with their claim that “‘locating’ Woolf is not an easy task” (1), considering both her fictional and non-fictional writings, which are permeated with a variety of spaces and places. They claim that Woolf was particularly interested in portraying a number of spaces in London mainly to draw attention to women’s relationship to the city and to its public spaces. As maintained by Thacker, “modernist writing can be located only within the movements between and across multiple sorts of space” (Thacker 8) and Woolf, in this respect, was one of the most prominent modernist writers to cut across the borders between outer and inner spaces and to adopt the idea of a dynamic self and space that could overthrow fixed power hierarchies. In Woolf’s works space is not static, neutral or objectified. It is made up of relationships and its meanings may change with regard to its perceivers or occupiers. Thus, Snaith and Whitworth analyse Between the Acts as interrupting the unity of physical spaces and the continuity of the narrative constantly through “‘thresholds’ and ‘dips and hollows’, its characters dither and swither, and the discursive space of the novel relocates background and foreground, reordering the conventional spaces of gender difference” (2). They consider the novel to be a border text whose primary concerns are questions of difference and sameness, and how to deal with the unrepresented, “which occurs in the interval, between the acts, behind the scenes” (50).

As Snaith and Whitworth observe, particularly the notions of space and gender are inextricably connected to each other in Woolf’s work. Space serves as the medium for asking questions about gender, about the inclusion of one sex and the exclusion of the other and about the possibility of their access to power. Mental or conceived

18 spaces such as libraries, houses, and textual spaces (such as ellipses and parentheses) all demonstrate the capacity of space to diverge in terms of gender, whereas they can also overcome the same separation: “From questions of women’s relationship to national space in Three Guineas, to intellectual space in A Room or One’s Own, to artistic space in To The Lighthouse, it was through discourses of space that Woolf articulated the exclusions and boundaries that regulated women’s bodies and minds” (Snaith and Whitworth 2).

Moreover, Snaith and Whitworth recognize Woolf’s relational conception of space in which “geographical interrelations, such as Wimpole Street and Whitechapel in Flush or the Thames and the Amazon in The Voyage Out” stood for abstract economic or imperial relationships. Embracing Massey’s idea that it is necessary “to conceptualize space as constructed out of interrelations, as the simultaneous coexistence of social interrelations and interactions at all spatial scales, from the most local level to the most global,” (80) they assert that questions of imperial space were also central to Woolf’s fiction, as exemplified in her efforts to demonstrate how the experience of living in England every day is conditioned by the colonial other such as Africa, India and Ireland.

1.1.2. Sickert’s Influence on Woolf’s Writing and Her Moments of Being

Snaith and Whitworth also draw attention to the much discussed issue among Woolf scholars (such as Hermione Lee) about whether or not Walter Sickert’s paintings influenced the way Woolf conveyed her characters in relation to the spaces they occupy and the objects they own in these spaces. As Goldman remarks, Sickert and his followers were keen on portraying the daily lives of ordinary working people (Goldman 142), and his emphasis on representing human beings in relation to the spaces they occupy is a characteristic feature of both his paintings of clothed human subjects in rooms and his nude figures; examples are Les Venitiennes, Les Petites Belges and The Little Tea Party: Nina Hamnett and Roald Kristian which shows the conflict between a married couple (Snaith and Whitworth 67). Woolf’s essay on Sickert points to and highly values this level of intimacy and connection between his

19 human figures and the spaces they occupy (Snaith and Whitworth 67). In this regard, Snaith and Whitworth claim that, similar to these paintings, Woolf shows an interest in the way in which space is imbued with meaning through relations between the human subject and objects, particularly in The Years. Making an analogy between Sara’s and Maggie’s room and the in-between place they occupy regarding their past and present, Snaith and Whitworth point to their finding that the interior of Sara’s and Maggie’s room is “never fully the ‘inside’ because of its proximity to the street” (76). They observe that the street outside intrudes into the room to such an extent that it serves as a part of the interiority, and therefore, the room is quite noisy, a detail which they relate to Woolf’s admiration of Sickert’s work (76):

Woolf’s observation of the importance of never straying outside the sound of the human voice, which was one of the things she professed to admire in Sickert’s work in the 1930s, is everywhere apparent in The Years, where she seems especially interested to ground voices in particular material contexts . . . Throughout the luncheon scene, Woolf appears anxious not to lose the ‘tangible quality’ that she found in Sickert’s painting . . . The Hyams Place luncheon, like Sickert’s paintings of women in rooms, pushes at the boundaries of what we mean by ‘interiority’ – in rooms, families, memories, individual consciousness – and its intimacy with the external in the form of material financial circumstances, physical surroundings, and social status, and their manifestation in physical objects.

The relationships human subjects have with the objects around them and the spaces they occupy have also been analysed by critics such as Stephanie Derisi. She starts her article by claiming that material objects are of great importance in many literary works of the modernist period, in that the characters’ connection with these objects enables them to acquire a sense of freedom. As she claims, modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf demonstrate “what happens when the boundaries of subject and object blur and how this intimate merging creates a sense of liberation from everyday existence” in their works (25). In this respect, Derisi provides a study of The Years by Virginia Woolf and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, both of which, she believes, attempt to remould the role and understanding of women during the 1930s by investigating the meaning behind domestic objects in and of the house. Recognizing that they had long been labelled as commodities or objects having no

20 other functions than working in the symbolic order, Woolf and Maurier “manipulated the patriarchal system through an exploration of their designated space, the domestic household, by examining the subject/object dichotomy” (4).

Derisi observes that in texts of Woolf and du Maurier women show a unique relationship with material objects in relation to their subjectivity. Female characters in their novels often go back to their childhood memories and experiences through the objects they come into daily contact with, which provides them with the opportunity to dispose of their expected roles and to explore novel opportunities such as a life without children and marriage, and a life with a career. As Derisi claims, the relationship women share with inanimate and particularly domestic objects “shows how time (the past and the future) manipulates freedom in the present moment” (4). Woolf names these moments of liberation “moments of being” and presents them as fairly uncommon occurrences in which a thing enables one to go back in time and reconnect with the past. Contrary to “non-being,” which is the ordinary routine of everyday life (which she calls the “cotton wool of daily life” (“A Sketch of the Past” 70)), moments of being are brief temporal experiences of self-realization resulting from an instant of rapture characterized by an ability to leave the body. It is in this moment of fullness of life that “one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present” (“A Sketch of the Past” 98). Derisi’s study serves as a significant work which shows how women achieve such moments of being with domestic objects in Woolf’s and Maurier’s selected books.

In another study Stevanato also draws attention to this feature of objects leading to moments of being in Woolf’s works, initially by pointing to Woolf’s inclination towards visuality and spatiality in her works. She comes up with three major criteria which make it possible to analyse the importance of the visual and spatial in Woolf’s works: “descriptive visuality, spatial form and cognitive visuality” (83). Descriptive visuality involves detailed spatial and visual description and, as Genette puts

21 forward, “a certain sensitivity to space . . . a kind of fascination with place” [n.2: Genette, “La Littérature et l’espace,” 44]4 (Stevanato 84). Woolf’s writings (her short stories, novels, criticism, essays, letters and diaries) are all characterized by this sort of fascination with the visual and spatial. As Stevanato maintains, Woolf’s interest and use of visuality and spatiality with her criticism of pure realistic representation can be witnessed in both her mimetic and her distorted descriptions of “surfaces and depths” as well as through her “phenomenal and inner vision” (84):

She could have fully underwritten what M. Proust made his narrator say: the kind of literature which contents itself with ‘describing things,’ with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality . . . since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express. (Stevanato 90)

In this regard, Stevanato asserts that Woolf’s prose, in particular, involves the presence of descriptive visuality marked by a number of repeating spatial indicators such as references to “place, space, descriptions of real or imaginary views or scenes, the outside and inside of houses, gardens, as well as seeing and tools of vision (such as mirrors and other reflecting surfaces), objects, shapes, colours and paintings” (91). These references can be seen even in titles such as ‘In the Orchard’, in which the story commences with a quick focus on place, later fluctuating between two main planes, above and beneath.

As can be observed in Derisi’s comments on the objects leading to moments of liberation in Woolf’s works, Stevanato also finds out that Woolf’s use of visual and spatial form is closely related to “epiphanic visuality,” by which he, also, refers to Woolf’s “moments of being.” He sees these moments as connecting “phenomenal visuality with inner visuality in that seeing external appearances also means seeing

4 Genette, “La Littérature et l’espace”, 44 (Stevanato’s translation of ‘une certaine sensibilité à l’espace […] une sorte de fascination du lieu’).

22 the hidden truth which lies behind them” (98). Stevanato thus stresses Woolf’s belief that moments of being can demonstrate both being and non-being as they can render a sense of totality (the individual’s identity may be lost in a restored wholeness) or a sense of nothingness (the individual’s identity may be lost in nothingness):

. . . it is not . . . simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me . . . a great delight to put the severed parts together . . . From this I reach what I might call a philosophy . . . that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art . . . certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have the shock. (Woolf, Moments of Being 72)

As Stevanato claims, the same shock of realization of unity and severance can be seen in Woolf’s use of seeing as a cognitive action in all its forms, “gazing, looking, watching, staring, seeing oneself, being seen, seeing oneself while being seen,” in her works (111). Seeing means difference and distance as the seeing subject is separated and thus different from the object seen; however, it also means bridging the distance between the subject and object: “The simple fact that it connects implies a distance to be bridged, since only what is separated can be connected” (111). This dichotomy of seeing involving both connection and differentiation at the same time also uncovers the dichotomous nature of identity and, as Stevanato claims, Woolf’s use of spatial form. Particularly in To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts, this involves seeing as a continuous search for a wholeness which compensates for all contradiction, severance and partial union:

Woolf’s prose is full of references to surrounding and liminal features (elements such as windows, frames, thresholds, edges, the horizon, looking- glasses, rooms, limits, boundaries, centres, borders, in-between areas) as well as alternatives for, or representatives of, the eye such as optical instruments (glasses, telescopes, binoculars, the lighthouse, the searchlight) . . . all occasions for, and receptacles of, seeing. Windows in particular represent preferential ‘avenues of vision’ which often cause the distance between eyes, or between subject and object of vision, to solidify in imaginary lines . . .

23 Collective scenes are also relational opportunities for investigating the modalities of seeing in its connecting and separating aspects. (117)

As seen from the discussion above, spatial analyses are being conducted more than ever on Woolf’s works, showing an increasing interest in spatial studies and important role spaces and places play in her works. However, these studies are either restricted to her essays, diaries, some well-known stories and some of her novels or they mainly analyse the use of spaces and places in her works in terms of gender. In this regard, using three spatial theorists with their differing focuses regarding space and place, this dissertation will yield a more comprehensive analysis of Woolf’s use of spaces and places by studying four of her novels, The Voyage Out (1915), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Years (1937), in terms of their critique of gender, class and nationality.

CHAPTER 2

A THEORETICAL BACKGROUND TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF SPACE IN MODERNISM

2.1. The Rise of the Notions of Simultaneity and Plurality of Times and Spaces

As Kern maintains in his critical book The Culture of Time and Space 1880 – 1918 (1983), the understanding and experience of time and space underwent great changes from the late nineteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth century, due to a number of changes that happened in the technological, scientific, literary, artistic, and philosophical currents of thought (Kern 313). Kern believes that the most crucial factor that led to changes in understanding time and space was the introduction of World Standard Time, which was introduced firstly in Britain, mainly as a result of the scheduling requirements of railroads in the late nineteenth century. Kern remarks that World Standard Time had a great impact on industry, war, communication and the daily lives of people and gave way to “explorations of a plurality of private times” (313) because it not only created more uniformity in shared public time, but also triggered more theorizing about plurality of private times that could change from one individual to another and from one moment to another in the individual. This interest in private time may have also resulted from a simultaneous rise in social individualism in that period. This notion of plurality of private times was a serious assault on the idea of “universal, unchanging, and irreversible public time” as well as on the traditional views about the nature of the world and man’s place in it (314). It corroded traditional ideas about the objectivity and stability of the material world, and the human mind’s ability to understand it:

25 Man cannot know the world ‘as it really is,’ if he cannot know what time it really is. If there are as many private times as there are individuals, then every person is responsible for creating his own world from one moment to the next, and creating it alone. In an age of intrusive electronic communication ‘now’ became an extended interval of time that could, indeed must, include events around the world. (Kern 314)

In this regard, Kern regards technological innovations such as the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile and airplane as contributory factors to the notions of simultaneity and plurality of times and spaces. As he claims, arising mainly from these technological developments, notions including “the plurality of spaces, the philosophy of perspectivism, the affirmation of positive negative space, the restructuring of forms, and the contraction of social distance” led to the questioning of traditional hierarchies (315). To illustrate how these technological advances were influential in creating new modes of thinking about the world that celebrated plurality and equality, in the period between the late nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century, Kern cites Francis Joseph (more commonly known as Franz Josef) a ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as an embodiment of the hierarchical world of the European aristocracy and royalty. He shows Franz Josef rebelling against the increasing notions of plurality and equality by forbidding the use of new technologies in his royal palace:

Reared under the rigid formalism of military life and the exacting requirements of one of the oldest surviving royal dynasties, convinced of his divine right to rule, hostile to the incursions of popular government, isolated socially in a circle of high nobility, and contemptuous of everyone of low birth, Francis Joseph . . . in the Hofburg in Vienna . . . allowed no electric lights, and kerosene lamps provided illumination. He shunned the use of typewriters and automobiles and refused to install telephones. The telephone in particular was incompatible with the aristocratic principle that certain persons . . . have special importance. (Kern 316)

Francis Joseph might have rejected using telephones in his palace, thinking that they could break down barriers of distance horizontally across space and vertically across social strata, which would make his seat of power accessible to all at any time. Conventions of elaborate protocol of introductions, invitations, and appointments as well as the protective function of doors, waiting rooms, and servants would, in this

26 way, be eliminated by the instantaneity of intrusive rings of telephones, which penetrated all places.

Many other technological advances had the same potential as the telephone to interfere into the retreats of the privileged. In this respect, cinema was a “democratic art” since the camera entered towns all over the country, and cheap entrance prices brought the upper and lower classes together in the same place (Scruton 87). In the same vein, the bicycle and the bus/omnibus were also “great levellers” in that they enabled middle and lower classes who could not afford an automobile to travel over fairly long distances (Gavin and Humphries 11). Moreover, new technology also made possible access to the long-established, highly-esteemed sky: “Never before the age of the wireless and airplane did the heavens seem to be so close or so accessible . . . Planes invaded the kingdom of heaven, and their exhaust fumes profaned the realm of the spirit. Upwards was still the direction of growth and life, but in this period it lost much of its sacred aspect” (Kern 317). All these changes in the experiences of daily life in the modern age as well as cultural developments including psychoanalysis, Cubism, the stream-of-consciousness novel and the theory of relativity led to the transformation of the dimensions of life and thinking about self, time and space.

2.1.1. Proliferation of Spaces as Multiple, Relative and Dynamic

Kern mainly attributes the new understanding of space with the qualities of being multiple, relative and dynamic to developments in the physical sciences, particularly to the development of non-Euclidean geometries that started in the early nineteenth century. He starts his discussion by talking about Euclid, whose geometric system of two and three dimensions had been considered “to be the only true geometry of real space” for over two millennia (Kern 132). Following Euclidean geometry, Kant believed that its hypotheses were true, which idea stayed at the centre of classical physics up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, in the course of the nineteenth century Euclid’s theory, particularly his Fifth Postulate that allows only one straight line to be drawn through a point parallel to a given straight line, began

27 to be challenged by other geometrical theories (Miller 8). Critics of Euclidean geometry replaced the hypothesis with others and altered the remaining propositions accordingly. One such critic was Nicholai Lobatchewsky who proposed a two- dimensional geometry in which it is possible to draw infinitely many lines through any point parallel to another line in the same plane and in which the sum of the angles of a triangle was less than 180 degrees (Miller 8-10). Following him, in 1854 Bernhard Riemann came up with another two-dimensional geometry in which the sum of the angles of triangles was more than 180 degrees. While Riemann’s space was elliptical, Lobatchewsky’s was hyperbolic, which was opposed to “the flat planar surface of Euclid’s two-dimensional geometry” in which the sum of the angles of a triangle formed was exactly 180 degrees (Kern 133). By the end of the nineteenth century other mathematicians had devised geometries for a variety of hypothesized spaces, including a doughnut and the inside of a tunnel.

There emerged other new spaces that could not be explained by any geometry, as well. For example, in 1901 Henri Poincaré proposed visual, tactile, and motor spaces, each of which was defined by different sensory apparatus. He claimed that geometrical space is three-dimensional, homogeneous, and infinite, whereas visual space is two-dimensional, heterogeneous, and limited to the visual field (Poincaré 50-58). This meant that while objects in geometrical space can be moved without distortion, objects in visual space appeared to grow and shrink in size when they are moved to different distances in relation to the viewer. Motor space also changes in line with the muscle registering it and has “as many dimensions as we have muscles” (Poincaré 50). Similar to Poincaré, Mach also suggested visual, auditory, and tactile spaces that changed in line with the sensitivity and reaction times of different parts of the sensory system (Mach 94), thereby establishing the physiological foundation for biological and natural development of geometrical space.

Propositions that there are also two- and three-dimensional spaces in addition to the one described by Euclid and that the experience of space is subjective and a function of the human being’s unique physiology were not welcomed by the conventional

28 thought system. One of the critics of these notions was V. I. Lenin who objected to the proliferation of spaces and to the Kantian view that space is not an objective reality but a form of understanding. He held an entirely materialist position on the understanding of space claiming that there exists an objective reality in which matter freely moves in space and time, independent from the human mind (Lenin 176-189). As Lenin says, his explanation of space was harshly criticized by Bogdanov in Empirio-monism (1904-1906), where Bogdanov argued for the social relativity of any experience: “time like space, is ‘a form of social coordination of the experiences of different people’” (Lenin 189). This relativistic idealism subverted materialism and the idea that there is only one framework of time and space in which all cultures participate.

2.1.2. Einstein and the Death of Absolute Space

Following the social relativism of Bogdanov, a far more influential theory of relativity was developed by Einstein in the early part of the twentieth century. As Kern asserts, Einstein was keenly interested in the physical world even when he was a small child and his work led to a revolution in physics regarding the understanding of space:

When he was five years old his father showed him a compass. The way the needle always pointed in one direction suggested that there was “something deeply hidden” in nature. Then at twelve he discovered a book on Euclidean geometry with propositions which seemed to be about a universal and homogeneous space. [n.1: Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes”]5 These early memories embodied two opposing views about the nature of space. The traditional view was that there was one and only one space that was continuous and uniform with properties described by Euclid’s axioms and postulates. Newton defined this “absolute space” as at rest, “always similar and immutable,” but the action of the compass suggested that space might be mutable, with orientations that varied according to its contents. The quivering needle pointed to the North Pole and to a revolution in physics. (132)

5Einstein, Albert. “Autobiographical Notes,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, Evanston, 1949, 9-11.

29 Einstein defined space as a quasi-perspectival distortion: the reduction in size was a distortion resulting from the act of observing from a moving reference system (Einstein 9). In his theory the relative speed of the object and viewer was the critical factor rather than the distance between them, which meant that in his explanation “no absolute meaning could be given to the concept of the actual length of the apparatus or of the space it occupies. Length is not in anything; it is a consequence of the act of measuring. Thus absolute space has no meaning” (Kern 136). In 1916 he declared: “We entirely shun the vague word ‘space’ of which . . . we cannot form the slightest conception and we replace it by ‘motion relative to a practically rigid body of reference’” (Einstein 9). His theory of relativity gave rise to the emergence of a number of spaces particularly after his bold assertion that “there is an infinite number of spaces, which are in motion with respect to each other” (Einstein 10).

Following Einstein’s declaration of the multiplicity of spaces, innovative ideas about the notion of space emerged, challenging the long-established idea that space was homogeneous and fixed. The belief that there is only one true space and point of view was attacked by studies carried out in a variety of areas including biology, sociology, art and literature. While biologists investigated the perceptions of different animals regarding space, sociologists explored the spatial configurations of different cultures. Painters pulled apart the standard perspectival space that had governed painting since the Renaissance and remodelled objects as seen from different perspectives. Novelists also utilized multiple points of views as was also the case of cinema with its versatility. Meanwhile, as prominent writers of philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche and José Ortega y Gasset came up with a philosophy of “perspectivism” which embraced the idea that there exist a multitude of different spaces just as there are multitudinous points of view.

2.1.3. Nietzsche and Ortega: The Philosophy of Perspectivism

Nietzsche had already started to underscore the one-sidedness and narrowness of academic thinking, which had been dominated by a Platonism that rejected the reliability of knowledge accessed through senses, and a kind of positivism that

30 ignored the inherent subjectivity of knowledge. Nietzsche believed that there are no objective facts but only points of views and interpretations:

Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: . . . these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity.” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 119)

In the same vein Ortega devised his theory of perspectivism in 1910, arguing for the view that there exist a variety of realities as different points of view. He proposed perspective as the basic constituent of reality: “God is perspective and hierarchy; Satan’s sin was an error of perspective . . . a perspective is perfected by the multiplication of its viewpoints” (Ortega, Meditations on Quixote 44). He believed that war between nations was the result of the rationalist stance taken by those nations claiming the accuracy of their ideals while rejecting others’, and that people should abandon such kinds of exclusivist viewpoints and develop a mind-set that celebrates plurality of perspectives. He associated his perspectivism with Einstein’s theory of relativity and considered the coincidence of their publication a sign of their time, in that both of them embodied the breakdown of the traditional idea that there is a single reality in a single and absolute space: “There is no absolute space because there is no absolute perspective. To be absolute, space has to cease being real – a space full of phenomena – and become an abstraction. The theory of Einstein is a marvellous proof of the harmonious multiplicity of all possible points of view” (Ortega, The Modern Theme 143). He also pointed out the ethical and political consequences of adopting a narrow point of view regarding the nature of reality by claiming that war emerged in Europe as a result of the same fixed narrow mind-set that European countries adopted such as the British “white man’s burden,” the French “mission civilisatrice,” and the German “deutsche Kultur” (Ortega, The Modern Theme 143). Ortega’s theory effected and was influenced by many others

31 including Lobatchewsky, Riemann, Einstein, Mach, Uexküll, Proust, and Joyce in that it shared their restlessness with the idea of a single reality or space and it regarded the diversity of experience as the main component of cultural progress.

2.1.4. The New Understanding of Space in Natural and Social Sciences

Kern points out that, while physical scientists and philosophers were coming up with studies arguing for the plurality and heterogeneity of space, natural scientists started to look into the connection between the structure of living things and their spatial orientation (136). For instance, in 1901 Elie de Cyon published a study on the natural basis of Euclidean geometry depending on the outcomes of experiments he had been carrying out on the physiological origins of experiencing space. What he hypothesized was that the sense of space is located in “the semi-circular canals of the ear. Animals with two canals experience only two dimensions and those with one canal are oriented in one. Humans experience three dimensions because they have three canals set in perpendicular planes, and three-dimensional Euclidean space corresponds to the physiological space determined by the orientation of these canals” (136). From his analyses de Cyon came up with the conclusion that space is not an inherent or a priori category of the mind as Kant claimed. Uexküll extended de Cyon’s proposal to the whole animal world arguing that the sense of space in animals changed with their unique physiology (Uexküll 328-329). The most outstanding proposition he made was that there might exist higher worlds of greater dimensions we are not capable of seeing, just as some living beings cannot see the stars of the sky. Such an innovative claim for different worlds with distinctive spatial orientations was a big challenge to the egocentric nature of man and was followed by another challenge coming from social scientists.

Scholars had travelled around the world and made excavations to learn about other societies, but their common mistake was that they always reconstructed the places they encountered or discovered in the uniform space of the modern Western world, never contemplating the fact that space could vary from one society to another as social practices. In this respect, one of the most influential social scientists

32 embracing the social relativity of space was Émile Durkheim, who argued that logical categories stem from social categories, and this included time and space. He cites the Zuni Indians as supporting evidence by demonstrating how they categorize space into seven regions: north, south, east, west, zenith, nadir, and center, stemming from social experience (Durkheim 43-44). Spengler, another social scientist, concluded that every culture has its own understanding of space and time that is embodied in its symbolism that surrounds every aspect of life. In this respect, Spengler proposes that the key symbol of “the Faustian soul of the modern age is limitless space. Faust’s restless striving, the soaring of Gothic cathedrals, and the proliferation of geometric spaces reflect this sense of infinity” (Spengler 337).

2.1.5. Radical Configurations of Space in the Early Twentieth Century Painting and Woolf

The new understanding of space resulting from the studies in physics, mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences and philosophy influenced thinking in other areas, including painting. It created a novel way of seeing and conveying objects in space and questioned the traditional idea which regarded space as homogeneous and fixed. From the Renaissance to the twentieth century, a perspectival understanding of space in which God’s hierarchy and order, the harmony of the things in nature, and human virtues could be seen, governed the representation of space in painting, despite infrequent variations of the rules of perspective. Tyler and Ione date the beginning of the move away from such an understanding of space in painting to the emergence of the Impressionists and Cubists (1-2), who, as Lee claims, influenced Woolf’s work in the late 1910s after Fry’s exhibition of the second Post-Impressionist exhibition that ran from October 1912 to January 1913 (Lee 324). Lee believes that particularly “Fry’s manifesto (‘These artists do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life’),” together with “the debate on ‘significant form’ which arose from it, and Clive Bell’s 1914 bible on the non- representational sources of aesthetic enjoyment, Art,” strongly affected Woolf’s ideas of writing (324).

33 Once the Impressionists left their painting studios to paint outside, they came across a diversity of points of views, light and colour. Dismissing Alberti’s principle that the canvas should be located exactly one meter from the ground while confronting the subject directly, the Impressionists placed it up or down and at unusual angles to produce new kinds of painting. In this respect, Kern regards Cézanne as the pioneering painter in his ability “to introduce a truly heterogeneous space in a single canvas with multiple perspectives of the same subject” (141). Cézanne considered an object in space to be “a multitude of creations of” the perceiver “that varied dramatically with the most minute shifts in point of view” (141). His significant innovations in the portrayal of space such as the use of multiple perspectives and the reduction of pictorial depth were built upon by the Cubists who made use of his techniques to yield more radical configurations of space (Herwitz 334-335). The Cubists’ use of multiple perspectives also bears a strong similarity to cinema, in that the cinema provided novel and varied spatial possibilities by manipulating space in many ways such as changing the frame by moving the camera or changing the angle of the lens. In addition to these techniques, the cinema could also show places which the audience were mostly unfamiliar with. As Noxon remarks, combining the innovations of Cézanne and the cinema, two pioneers of Cubism, Picasso and Braque, led to a great revolution in representing space in painting since the fifteenth century (26). They rejected the idea of the homogenous space with linear perspective, and painted objects from multiple perspectives with scrupulous views of their interiors, transcending the limitations of traditional art (26).

In addition to their efforts to convey a variety of points of views through painting, the Cubists also changed the traditional understanding of painting as the representation of things. While painters formerly considered painting the representation of an object in three-dimensional space, modern artists came up with the idea that art should not necessarily represent anything at all: “it must be what it is – a composition of forms on a flat surface” (Kern 145). This characteristic of modern art was openly declared by the art critic Maurice Denis in 1900 when he said, “a picture – before being a war horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote – is

34 essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order” [n.33: Wechsler, Cézanne in Perspective, 7]6 (Kern 145). The Cubists achieved this characteristic by using such techniques as multiple perspective, multiple light sources, the dilution of aerial perspective, the disintegration of distinct forms and orderly overlapping. Many people saw this proliferation of perspectives and breakdown of a homogeneous three-dimensional space as a symptom of the confusion of the modern age characterized by plurality. To represent this plurality, while painters, being restricted to “a single instant,” employed multiple perspective to render objects as they appeared in time, writers, being limited to “a series of single settings,” made use of multiple perspective to convey differing views of objects in space (Kern 148).

2.1.6. Multiplicity of Spaces as Reflected in the Works of Modernist Writers: Proust and Joyce

As Lee remarks, the reading and rereading activities Woolf did especially in the years between Night and Day and Jacob’s Room – of Joyce, Eliot, Hardy, Chaucer and the Elizabethans, the Russian writers and of Proust – is as significant to her life and writing as any of her life experiences (403). It was during this period of her life that she came up with a way of writing about her reading “somewhere between notebook, diary, fiction and criticism” (403), and also in this period that she was particularly moved and influenced by Proust’s style. Lee exemplifies Woolf’s love for Proust’s sensual style by quoting from a letter to Roger Fry in which Woolf says:

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh, if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures – there’s something sexual in it – that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves

6 Wechsler, Judith. Ed. Cézanne in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1975. 7.

35 of language in me: it becomes an obsession. [n: 35 VW to RF, 6 May 1922, L II, 525]7 (Lee 410)

In another example, Lee points to a Proustian phrase in Woolf’s Moments of Being: “You entered Talland House by a large wooden gate, the sound of whose latch clicking comes back” (n: 37 Woolf, Moments of Being, 111) (Lee 29). As seen, Woolf’s earliest memories come back to her in the same way as Marcel’s vast collections of memories ignited through the taste of the Madeleine.

Proust used different techniques to represent plurality in his novels. Marcel’s account of consecutive views of a sunrise seen through the window of a speeding train in Swann’s Way strikingly shows how Proust conveys multiple perspectives of objects seen in a short period of time. He also renders another proliferation of space that is produced over long periods of time by feelings about the settings of significant events. After many years, his protagonist and narrator Marcel comes back to the Bois de Boulogne to try to recover the pleasures of his childhood; however, he finds everything changed (for example the carriages have been replaced by motor cars and the women wear different hats). He realizes that space is as prone to changing perspectives, feelings and the incessant transformation of everything in time as the objects it contains. In this respect, it is important to note that Joyce’s reconstruction of events from a variety of points of view, as in the tenth chapter of Ulysses (1922) known as the “Wandering Rocks”, can be considered in line with Proust’s understanding of plurality of perspectives and truths about things and space. Joyce’s imaginings of a multiplicity of coexisting universes and his making fun of the literary convention to giving a precise location of an action demonstrate how his understanding and portrayal of world, self, time and space are as diverse and unstable as the number and variety of different observers at different times, like Proust’s and Woolf’s. Considering their practices, it can be claimed that these two prominent

7 Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 80.6, 1975, 525.

36 modernist novelists – Proust and Joyce – helped convert the stage of modern literature from a number of fixed settings in a homogeneous space into a great number of different spaces that varied with changing perspectives of human consciousness.

2.1.7. Challenge to the Idea of Space as an Inert Void: Positive Negative Space

In addition to the new understanding of the notion of space as heterogeneous and characterized by multiplicity of perspectives, another pivotal issue that arose about the nature of space was its constituency. The traditional idea of space as an inert void in which objects existed was gradually supplanted by the idea that space was active and full, and the idea was supplied by a multitude of discoveries, inventions, technological advances, paintings, novels and philosophical and psychological theories. Kern calls this new understanding “positive negative space” (Kern 153). As described by art critics, while the subject of a painting is positive space, the background is negative space. In this respect, positive negative space means that the background, which was formerly neglected as a fixed and homogeneous element, is a positive element as well, of the same importance as the other constituents of a painting. According to Kern, this new notion effectively conveys the historical sense of the developments in the period and implies that what was considered negative before now possessed a positive and constitutive aspect (153). One important consequence of such an understanding was the overthrow of previous distinctions between what was regarded as primary and secondary in the experience of space: “It can be seen as a breakdown of absolute distinctions between the plenum of matter and the void of space in physics, between subject and background in painting, between figure and ground in perception, between the sacred and the profane space of religion” (Kern 153).

Kern mainly relates this understanding of space as active and full to the appearance of Einstein’s field theory which rejected the traditional view that regarded the electromagnetic field as a material carrier, reducing space to a state of physical description. While light travels through empty and static space in Newton’s

37 mechanics, in Einstein’s theory everything is thought to be in motion throughout the field simultaneously, making space full and dynamic, participating in physical happenings (153).

The notion of positive negative space is considered to have had a huge impact on the breakdown of many long-standing ideas about the world, self, time and space in that it attributed a constituent function to what was formerly seen as unimportant and inferior. In this regard, as Kern suggests, it contributed immensely to the advancement of political democracy, the breakdown of aristocratic privilege and the secularization of life, as well and the most tremendous disturbance of traditional hierarchy happened as a result of the secularization of life and thinking (153). In the traditional understanding of divine right, the right to reign came from God, but during the eighteenth century it changed from divine right to sovereignty in power, resulting in the loss of the sacred character of Christian monarchs and in the rise of parliaments and congresses. As Kern maintains, “the setting for significant events in history shifted from the sacred spaces of heaven, the church, and the palace to the profane spaces of the battlefield, workshop, marketplace, and home” (178).

Not only directions or places in space but also the long-established values of the Western world lost their former pre-eminence with the collapse of traditional faith. In 1882 Nietzsche announced the death of God, associating positive negative space with a profanation of religious space and exhorting people to rise against nothingness:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? (Nietzsche, The Gay Science 181)

The long-held distinction between the so-called revered spaces of churches, palaces and national institutions, and the base space of outside was blurred as a result of the breakdown of hierarchies and binaries. Some artists and intellectuals felt lost confronting nothingness and breakdown of old hierarchies while others overcame

38 the nihilistic despair by trying to create their own meaning: “This was to be the great creative effort of the overmen . . . If there are no holy temples, any place can become sacred; if there are no consecrated materials, then ordinary sticks and stones must do . . .” (Kern 179). It is quite understandable that the leading architects of the modernist period preferred simple materials of stone, wood, brick and glass, and made no use of facades or ornaments that extravagantly decorated sacred or royal structures of the past, a practice that can also be commonly observed in a broad range of areas or individual works such as in “physical fields, architectural spaces, and town squares; Archipenko’s voids, Cubist interspaces, and Futurist force-lines; theories about the stage, the frontier, and national parks; Conrad’s darkness, James’s nothing, and Maeterlinck’s silence; Proust’s lost past, Mallarmé’s blanks, and Webern’s pauses” (179). All of these areas or works share the same characteristic of reviving the long- held neglected empty spaces that had only a minimal role of supporting, and of granting them to the same level of importance and attention with traditionally overvalued subjects. Through such a thought system figure and ground of painting, print and blanks of writing, and bronze and empty spaces of buildings begin to express equal value, which enabled value to be determined by aesthetic sensibility, public utility, or scientific experiments, not by hereditary privilege, divine right, or religious truth. With the emergence of positive negative space traditional ideals of privilege, power, and holiness were attacked, which started to give more spaces to new and formerly devalued practices, beliefs and thoughts.

Among the many disciplines in which this creative effort was giving new meaning to life, architecture led in effectively using the new, modernist notion of positive negative space. As Glendinning proposes, the history of architecture can be seen as the history of shaping space in line with a variety of accepted political, social and religious ideologies (358-359), an idea which can also be observed in Lefebvre’s ideas regarding mental space in the production of space. Each time period in history is thought to possess a distinctive understanding of space unique to it. In this respect, the nineteenth century was the period when large but empty interior spaces began to be considered an embodiment of poverty due to the arrival of a flood of industrial

39 products. Rooms were cluttered with decorative picture frames, drapes and furniture. This understanding of space was dismissed with the emergence of positive negative space in which the background or space regained its importance as a constituent as the remaining objects contained in it in modernism (Kern 155).

The notion of positive negative space affected the literature of the period as well, which can be observed in the increasing use of empty spaces and silence as subjects of novels and short stories (Kern 166). Citing Howe’s study which claims that in novels of the period characters were frequently portrayed as suffering from claustrophobia in their native land, becoming greedy for land and annoyed by their boundaries at home, Kern notes that while some were thrilled, others were horrified by the perceived vastness of emptiness of colonized places, as can be seen in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where:

the empty space was overpowering: it drew Marlow and destroyed Kurtz . . . [This novella] is a catalogue of literary images of the void applied in the context of imperialism. Conrad interprets the darkness as a levelling force that negates the status distinctions of class and privilege that regulated European life. In the wilderness the older class lines were obsolete . . . In the face of danger, in the darkness; all men are pretty much alike. (Kern 168)

Whereas empty space and silence were employed as subjects of novels and short stories, in understandings of poetry a shift had happened such that it was not seen so much as a composition of words to an arrangement of words and the blank spaces between them. Witnessed initially in French symbolists’ experiment with free verse, the new poetry aimed for the effect it produced rather than the form. It utilized evocation, allusion and suggestion rather than looking for precise descriptions, challenging the traditional view that depended on the metaphysical assumption that only the things which exist, exist.

2.2. A Theoretical Overview of Selected Spatial Theorists

All these changes that happened in the understanding of the world, self, nature of truth, time and space in many facets of life and areas of study led to an increasing

40 interest in investigating space, following the first quarter of the twentieth century. Recently, studies on place have become one of the most popular interdisciplinary fields for investigation. They emphasize the dynamic nature of place which gives way to changes in many aspects of life such as the politics of identity and interactions between individuals and their cultural, social, political and economic environment. As Ardoin maintains, there exist numerous definitions of place yielded by different disciplines (113), even though they are all united in their main objectives: to examine the ways in which place and human and non-human relations are established, and to study how interdisciplinary communication could benefit the theorization of the concept. The most common questions asked by these various fields of study are, therefore, about why place is an important term in humanities, to what extent place shapes human and non-human relations and it is shaped by them, how spatiality plays a role in defining place and whether the notion of space restricts place to a physical lot, contrasting it with its own so-called limitlessness. Among these central questions, one of them shows the general inclination of theorists studying place, and this is to relate it to space, an understanding which needs definition of a spatial concept. In this respect, the Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, who is one of the major theorists to be used in this dissertation, provides a significant account of the study of space which has influenced many succeeding theorists from various disciplines.

2.2.1 Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault on Space: Space as a Social Construct

Lefebvre was a key figure in initiating what Foucault referred to as “the epoch of space” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 22) in social theory in the latter part of the 20th century, and he had a great influence on the next generation of spatial theorists such as David Harvey, Edward Soja and Frederic Jameson. In his well-known work The Production of Space (1974), Lefebvre emphasizes that his aim was “not to produce a (or the) discourse on space, but rather to expose the actual production of space by bringing various kinds of space and modalities of their genesis together into a single

41 theory” (16). He chiefly identifies “the forces of production” operating in the construction of place as “nature, labour, the organization of labour, technology and knowledge” (46). Each space is constructed to serve the social structure or a particular cultural practice. “The space thus produced,” he claims, is also “a tool of thought and of action” besides “being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power” (26). For him, social space is produced through such complexity that it cannot be totally understood without a comprehensive examination of these dynamic relations. This cultural materialist understanding of space rejects the so-called givenness of both space and place and dismisses their traditional understanding as definite and stable physical entities, calling for a notion of space and place constantly in flux because of their relation to social, cultural, economic and political structures. In this respect, before going into a detailed analysis of Lefebvre’s understanding of space, one should consider Foucault’s similar ideas regarding space; this will pave the way for a deeper discussion of Lefebvre.

As Soja maintains, very little has been written about the convergence of the ideas of Lefebvre and Foucault concerning space which triggered a search for an innovative transformation in thinking about space in the late 1960s and early years of the 1970s (101). Both of these theorists found the prevalent understanding of thinking about and theorizing space too confining and inadequate to comprehend the new world in all its complexity. A majority of spatial scholars at that time still adopted a materialist concept of space featured by concrete and empirically described geographies, resulting in extremely descriptive conditions. Contrary to this group of thinkers, Lefebvre and Foucault put their emphasis not directly on material things but on “‘thoughts about space,’ how materialized space is conceptualized, imagined, or represented in various ways, from the subjective mental maps of the world we all carry with us to scientific epistemologies and philosophies of space and place” (Soja 101). First of all, both of them started with the same basic idea that human space is socially constituted in all its forms and expressions. We created our own geographies as we did in the case of our histories “under conditions not of our own choosing but

42 in real-world contexts already shaped by socio-spatial processes in the past and the enveloping historically and socially constituted geographies of the present” (103), which dismisses the idea of space as a neutral setting for events happening around us. Another important point Lefebvre and Foucault share is that an understanding of our geographies and histories as socially produced gains us awareness that the geographies may have positive and negative effects upon their inhabitants; they can give opportunity, stimulate, enable or liberate; they can also hinder opportunity, dominate, imprison, oppress or weaken. In other words, spaces can be just or unjust and they are produced through a multitude of processes that are social, spatial, subjective, objective, and real or imagined at the same time. As seen, for Lefebvre and Foucault, space is an important shaping force in society “from the intimacies of the body and the little tactics of the habitat to the playing out of global geopolitics and the repetitive crises of capitalism” (Soja 104). As Soja emphasizes, adopting such spatial consciousness contributes to human beings, considering the fact that socially produced spaces can be changed or transformed for the better.

One of the most established social theorists with a variety of interests, Michel Foucault has made various contributions to social theory. Although he does not have a systematized elaboration on architecture and the notion of space, both of these are crucial elements of his enquiries, and his limited number of ideas on space is nevertheless powerful enough, when combined with the work of Lefebvre, to have led to a spatial turn in various disciplines. Mainly in his books Birth of the Clinic (1963) and Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault identifies space as playing a critical role in the production of scientific knowledge and the implementation of power and knowledge. Foucault maintains that the production of space in cities, clinics, factories or prisons is not a neutral social practice but it is one aiming at certain targets for the implementation of power.

As Foucault proposes, spatialization plays a contributory role in empirical relation to reality and, therefore, has enabled the realization of the scientific observation and production of scientific knowledge, particularly in medicinal practice and its

43 discourse. In his Birth of the Clinic, he draws attention to this spatialization and to spatial techniques in medicinal discourse: “The appearance of the clinic . . . must be identified . . . by the minute but decisive change, whereby the question ‘What is the matter with you?’, with which the eighteenth century dialogue between doctor and patient began . . . was replaced by that other question: ‘Where does it hurt?’, in which we recognize the principle of the clinic and the operation of its entire discourse” (Foucault, Birth of the Clinic xviii). This question of where it hurts unveils a discourse which already has appropriated and localized the cause of the illness in the body. This localization and the immobilization of the body is also carried out in its presence in the unit of the clinic or hospital as well. As Foucault claims, architectural and spatial organization of the hospital causes isolation and individualization of the patient and enables the practice of care, control, surveillance and the study of the patient and his/her illness; that is to say, the hospital or clinic as the centre of medicinal discourse and practice owns a particular architectural arrangement which maintains the discourse and its practice. Foucault points to the same relation between an institution and its spatial configuration in his analysis of the “Panopticon” in Discipline and Punish. The Panopticon functions on the basis of the same principle of isolation of the body as hospitals. Foucault describes this prison in the following way:

at the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other on the outside, allows the light to cross from the one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in the central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy . . . He is seen but he does not see; He is the object of information, never a subject in communication. (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 200)

In the transparent cell, the prisoner is constantly aware that he is being monitored at any time and the planned result of the Panopticon is for the prisoners to achieve self- internalization of implied rules and norms. Under these rules and with the constant

44 expectation for punishment, the prisoners start to control themselves. This famous analysis of the Panopticon reveals how architectural arrangement is configured to promote a social practice and can gain more than mere imprisonment can do. Foucault’s analysis of the clinic and the prison, in addition to their analogies to other institutions such as classrooms and factories, uncovers the common feature of these institutions: that they are constituted of disciplinary areas:

Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation; it was a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration. Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to asses it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space. (West-Pavlov 132)

As such, architecture is the spatial dimension of the exercise of power in societies. It is employed in an attempt to create a sense of self-discipline and the internalisation of values that are deemed normal; they exert their discipline not only on so-called deviants such as the criminal, the undeserving poor, the delinquent, but also on the general population.

In a similar line of thought with Lefebvre’s concept of “social space,” Foucault also comes up with an alternative way of interpreting human spatiality. In his “Of Other Spaces” he calls this comprehensive and critical spatial perspective “heterotopology.” His heterotopias which emerge out of the intersection of space, knowledge, and power, yield new ways of thinking spatially in that they make us aware that space is full of conflicting ideas such as justice and injustice, oppressive power and the possibility for emancipation and utopian ideals and dystopian oppression:

heterotopia is always a space/place which has special characteristics that do not come from their material essence or sole architectural conceivement. The

45 heterotopic status of the place is defined by the social and cultural praxis that is connected to it, or through the meanings and messages that heterotopic space emits. Realizing that every culture in the history of mankind has its own various heterotopias, we should also realize a universal need for other spaces, as spaces where a cultural praxis or social need is being conducted away from this space, this society/culture, at last this world, this life and this reality. (Grbin 309-310)

Foucault provides several examples of heterotopias, but he does not give an exact definition of the term. He remarks that all societies have heterotopias even though none of them is universal. His examples are the places used for rituals such as those regarding adolescence, or isolation during pregnancy or menstrual cycles in primitive societies. Another example of heterotopias is the places which last for very long times but whose function changes throughout history, such as cemeteries. Moreover, heterotopias may contain a variety of spaces which are incompatible and contrasting, as seen in the example of film projection of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas. Heterotopias can be connected to other times as well, as can be seen in the examples of museums and libraries. Finally, heterotopias are other places with a system of opening and closing, making them both penetrable and impenetrable due to the ritual tasks or special permissions required for entrance or exit –another example he provides for this is that of Scandinavian saunas.

Quite similar to Foucault’s ideas regarding space as playing a critical role in maintaining the dominant discourse of power, in The Production of Space Lefebvre, starts his discussion by drawing attention to the important part space plays in individuals’ lives:

leisure, work, play, transportation, public facilities all are spoken of in spatial terms. Even illness and madness are supposed by some specialists to have their own peculiar space. We are thus confronted by an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next: geopolitical, economic, demographic, sociological, ecological, political, commercial, national, continental, global. (8)

Lefebvre draws attention to the fact that every utterance is located in a space because every discourse basically says something about space or particular places and “every

46 discourse is emitted from a space. Distinctions must be drawn between discourse in space, discourse about space and the discourse of space” (141). Moreover, he frequently highlights his idea that knowledge is also the space where individuals may take sides and express their ideas of the objects in their discourse. In this regard, he also draws attention to how the dominant discourse of power deeply influences and establishes individuals and every part of life:

Hegemony implies more than an influence, more even than the permanent use of repressive violence. It is exercised over society as a whole, culture and knowledge included, and generally via human mediation: policies, political leaders, parties, as also a good many intellectuals and experts. It is exercised, therefore, over both institutions and ideas. The ruling class seeks to maintain its hegemony by all available means, and knowledge is one such means. The connection between knowledge (savoir) and power is thus made manifest . . . Is it conceivable that the exercise of hegemony might leave space untouched? Could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations . . . The answer must be no. (Lefebvre 10-11)

He points to the active and instrumental role of space as knowledge in the existing modes of production, demonstrating how space serves hegemony and how hegemony employs it in the establishment of its system. To exemplify his point, he talks about how religious ideology makes use of named places – such as Christianity’s churches, confessionals, altars and sanctuaries – to maintain itself in society: “What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes . . . The Christian ideology . . . has created the spaces which guarantee that it endures” (Lefebvre 52). Another example he provides concerns architecture such as skyscrapers and state buildings that favour verticality over horizontality thus introducing a phallic element to public visual realms: “the purpose of this display, of this need to impress, is to convey an impression of authority to each spectator. Verticality and great height have ever been the spatial expression of potentially violent power” (108). The last striking example is related to the way gender is treated in societies. He refers to the devaluation of being a woman in different societies in history, such as in ancient Greek society, and talks about how this devaluation is conveyed through spatial configurations: “The Greeks reduced the woman’s station

47 to that of the fertility of a field owned and worked by her husband. The female realm was in the household: around the shrine or hearth; around the omphalos, a circular, closed and fixed space; or around the oven . . . social status was restricted just as their symbolic and practical status was” (248).

Another striking association Lefebvre makes is the one between the body and space. He claims that a living body constitutes both itself in space and that particular space: “the body with the energies at its disposal, the living body, creates or produces its own space; conversely, the laws of space, which is to say the laws of discrimination in space, also govern the living body and the deployment of its energies” (179). In this regard, as he maintains, the living body, a kind of space itself, constitutes not only itself but also its own “counterpart or ‘other’, its mirror-image or shadow,” leading to contacts, divisions, gaps or tensions at the same time (193).

Lefebvre states that representations of space as static arise partly from Immanuel Kant, who regarded space as both a pre-existing void filled up by human activity and a reified thing (Lefebvre 2-3). Challenging such an understanding of the notion of space, Lefebvre declares that space is culturally, historically and ideologically constructed. He claims that “(social) space is a (social) product” (26) and “any space implies, contains, and dissimulates social relationships” (83). He particularly emphasizes that even the natural space is “‘over-inscribed’ . . . what space signifies is dos and don’ts – and this brings us back to power” (151). In this regard, Lefebvre endows social space with a generative force, which claims that social space is a product that is not only a fixed “outcome of past actions”, but also something that “permits fresh actions to occur” (73). Therefore, social space is “at once a result and cause, product and producer” of social relations and power and it is not completely encompassed by power. Social space is “not . . . an empty and neutral milieu occupied by dead objects” but “a field of force full of tensions and distortions” (145). It is a dynamic site which is oppressive and emancipating at the same time, liable to new uses and practices.

48 One of the main arguments of Lefebvre’s work is that cities are highly complicated entities inimicable to any simple explanation. He believed that the concept of space meant something more than the physical; therefore, he formulated three interconnected spatial concepts: physical space (spatial practice), mental space (representations of space) and social space (representational space), which are also referred to as perceived, conceived and lived spaces, in order to demonstrate the role of space (in its various aspects) in society more effectively. His notion of physical space, which resembles long-established definitions of space, denotes physical form perceived through the senses, while mental space refers to the conceptual or non- physical technical renderings produced by “scientists, planners, urbanists . . . social engineers” (46). The production of space relies on these two but it is more heavily influenced by social space, which is strongly affected by our imaginations and is more open to change; whereas physical space and mental space are highly shaped by the status quo, “representational space is alive: it speaks. It has an affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square, church, graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies time” (42). In this respect, Lefebvre refers to the debt he owes to Bachelard in his own understanding of representational space as something alive:

Thus both Heidegger’s and Bachelard’s writings – the importance and influence of which are beyond question – deal with this idea in a most emotional and indeed moving way. The dwelling passes everywhere for a special, still sacred, quasi-religious and in fact almost absolute space. With his ‘poetics of space’ and ‘topophilia’, Bachelard links representational spaces, which he travels through as he dreams (and which he distinguishes from representations of space, as developed by science), with this intimate and absolute space. The contents of the House have an almost ontological dignity in Bachelard: drawers, chests and cabinets are not far removed from their natural analogues, as perceived by the philosopher-poet, namely the basic figures of nest, shell, corner, roundness, and so on. (Lefebvre 121)

As he claims, there have always been attempts to reduce this living social space to what hegemony desires it to be, particularly to mental space: “Reductionism . . . infiltrates science under the flag of science itself. Reduced models are constructed- models of society, of the city, of institutions, of the family . . . This is how social

49 space comes to be reduced to mental space by means of a ‘scientific’ procedure whose scientific status is really nothing but a veil for ideology” (117).

For Lefebvre the production of space is more than just a physical act, involving the interplay of physical, mental and social spaces that are produced and reproduced through social, economic, cultural, ideological and political processes: “It is reasonable to assume that spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces contribute in different ways to the production of space according to their qualities and attributes, according to the society or mode of production in question, and according to the historical period” (54). He exemplifies his point by talking about the Middle Ages in terms of these three terms of space. He illustrates spatial practice in the Middle Ages through the example of local roads situated near peasant communities, through castles and monasteries, through major roads between towns, and the routes of pilgrims and crusaders. In contrast to practice, representations of space in the Medieval age, were acquired from Aristotelian and Ptolemaic conceptions adapted by Christianity, he claims. They represent:

the Earth, the underground ‘world’, and the luminous Cosmos, Heaven of the just and of the angels, inhabited by God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. A fixed sphere within a finite space, diametrically bisected by the surface of the Earth; below this surface, the fires of Hell; above it, in the upper half of the sphere, the Firmament – a cupola bearing the fixed stars and the circling planets – and a space criss-crossed by divine messages and messengers and filled by the radiant Glory of the Trinity. (53)

His examples of representational spaces in the Middle Ages are those that determined the central and critical areas of the surrounding area such as “the village church, graveyard, hall and fields, or the square and the belfry” (53).

Lefebvre examines how the dominant ideologies at work in a society produce specific codifications of space that restrict the movements of individuals to certain places in their society:

Social space contains and assigns (more or less) appropriate places to – (1) the social relations of reproduction, i.e. the biophysiological relations

50 between the sexes and between age groups, along with the specific organization of the family; and (2) the relations of production, i.e. the division of labour and its organization in the form of hierarchical social functions. (32)

Embracing these specific spatial codes, individuals of a particular society might comply with “their space and . . . their status as ‘subjects’ acting within that space” and “comprehending it” (17) or, as has been stated before, the open-ended character of social space makes it a site for the creation of “a differential space” that defies the hegemony of the ruling ideology (302). In this respect, he differentiates between two different kinds of spaces: “dominated (dominant) space” and “appropriated space” as well. He defines dominated space as a space transformed or mediated by technology or practice. For him, dominated space is closely related to political power: “Thanks to technology, the domination of space is becoming . . . completely dominant. The ‘dominance’ . . . has deep roots . . . in the historical sphere, for its origins coincide with those of political power itself. Military architecture, fortifications . . . dams . . . all offer many fine examples of dominated space . . . Dominant space is invariably the realization of a master’s project” (173). On the other hand, he describes appropriated space as a kind of natural space altered to fulfil the needs of a group and appropriated by that particular group. He emphasizes that these two spaces are never divorced from one another, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all spaces in a society:

Peasant houses and villages speak: they recount, though in a mumbled and somewhat confused way, the lives of those who built and inhabited them. An igloo, an Oriental straw hut or a Japanese house is every bit as expressive as a Norman or Provençal dwelling. Dwelling-space may be that of a group . . . or that of a community . . . Private space is distinct from, but always connected with, public space. In the best of circumstances, the outside space of the community is dominated, while the indoor space of family life is appropriated. (174-175)

Following Lefebvre’s theory of space, there has been a boost in concern with space within various disciplines such as sociology, geography, feminist geography, urban studies, and cultural studies of everyday life, all of which shed new light on the understanding of the relationship between spatial divisions, power, and political

51 agency. They all challenge the conventional notion of space as a homogeneous, objective, empty container in which culture and history evolve, by contending that social space is both a product and producer of human goals, incentives, powers, and practices, all of which vary from individual to individual regarding their gender, class, race, and nationality.

2.2.1.1 Interdependence of the Social and Spatial: Doreen Massey and David Harvey

Embracing Lefebvre’s ideas on space, the well-known geographers Doreen Massey and David Harvey investigate the social construction of space from the perspective of cultural geography and have devised an innovative approach to space by means of which place is also redefined. Like Lefebvre, Massey also regards space as constituted through social relations, which she believes make it dynamic. As she says, “we need to conceptualize space as . . . the simultaneous coexistence of social interrelations and interactions at all spatial scales, from the most local level to the most global” (264). She defines place in line with space as a distinct expression of the relations the space holds: “The identities of place are always unfixed, contested and multiple. And the particularity of any place is . . . constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counter-position to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘beyond.’” (5) Massey also builds on Lefebvre’s understanding of space and place by adding the dimension of gender, claiming that “space and place, spaces and places . . . are gendered through and through. And this gendering of space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood” (186). As she maintains, while time was coded masculine traditionally, space was regarded as feminine and denoting absence or lack. In this view time and masculinity were attributed with progress, history, civilization and transcendence whereas the opposite of these positive qualities were attributed to space and femininity. The same coding could be observed in the pair, space and place: it was place which stood for local, specific, concrete and descriptive,

52 thereby feminine while space was general, universal, abstract and theoretical, which makes it masculine. In this regard, Massey also touches upon the other associations made regarding women, men and place:

First there is the argument of an association between the feminine and the local because – it is said – women lead more local lives than do men . . . which clearly relates to that about the public/private division . . . Thus, the term local is used in derogatory reference to feminist struggles and in relation to feminist concerns in intellectual work (it is only a local struggle, only a local concern) . . . Woman stands as metaphor for Nature . . . for what has been lost (left behind), and that place called home is frequently personified by, and partakes of the same characteristics as those assigned to, Woman/Mother/lover . . . in certain cultural quarters, the mobility of women does indeed seem to pose a threat to a settled patriarchal order. (Massey 9- 11)

Moreover, Massey pushes the focus of Lefebvre’s, and Marxists’ or cultural materialist focus on space one step forward by suggesting a reconsideration of the implications of the view that space is socially constituted. Her concern is the one- sidedness of that view which could render geographical forms as simple end products. Therefore, she underscores her idea that the social and spatial are interdependent and that “the social is spatially constructed, too” (143).

Massey’s emphasis on the interdependence of the social and the spatial and her stress on place as a social construct can also be observed in David Harvey’s ideas about space and place. In his Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996), Harvey similarly maintains that notions of space and time affect the way we perceive and construct the world by providing us with “a reference system by means of which we locate ourselves (or define our ‘situatedness’ and ‘positionality,’ to use the language . . .) with respect to that world” (208), which makes the notion of “place” essential in further discussions of space and time:

This in turn has implications for how we “place” things and how we think of “our place” in the order of things in particular . . . We express norms by putting people, events, and things in their “proper” place and seek to subvert norms by struggling to define a new place (“on the margin” . . . for example) from which the oppressed can freely speak. (Harvey 208)

53 For Harvey, places are thus social constructs and investigating place as a social construct means paying attention to the social system, the dynamics of geopolitical power relations, cultural relations, and the conflicting identities of any categories such as ethnic, gendered, racial and national groupings, all of which make the meaning of a place individual and collective at the same time.

2.2.2 Space and Place in Relation to Human Beings: Yi-Fu Tuan

Another important geographer (one of the major theorists to be used in this study) to theorise upon place with a specific aim for its relation to individual human beings is Yi-Fu Tuan who has published a number of influential essays and books. Regarded as one of the pioneers in the field of human geography and in merging it with philosophy, art, psychology, and religion, Tuan’s work has led to the establishment of what is known as “humanist geography”. Humanist geography is a branch of geography which examines how humans interact with space and their physical and social environments. It studies the spatial and temporal distribution of population and the organization of societies in the world. It also points to people’s perceptions, creativity, personal beliefs, and experiences in developing attitudes towards their environments. In this regard, Yi-Fu Tuan was greatly interested in the way people feel and think of place and space. In his Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977) he demonstrates how people are attached to their homes, neighbourhoods or towns, cities and countries as well as how the feelings of people about space and time are influenced by culture, society and sense of time. As he applies his concepts to cultural examples throughout the work, he exposes how human beings are oriented in place, space, and time. The book shows shifts in applying place and space to experience, proving Tuan’s claim that his book is “aiming more often to suggest than to conclude” (7).

One of the core themes of Tuan’s book is the experiences of the individual in space: “how the human person, who is animal, fantasist, and computer combined, experiences and understands the world” (Tuan 5). His definitions of “place” and

54 “space” appear throughout the book in a fluid way, shifting as he utilizes different aspects of experience to his focus. The book commences with an emphasis on how the child grows into the spatial values of his or her society and Tuan claims that babies’ explorations of space vary from one culture to another. He exemplifies his claim by talking about the spatial experiences of babies from two different cultures: “The more hostile the environment, the closer the attachment to the protective adult. Bushman babies of southwest Africa, for example, are less ready to stray from the mother in their playful exploration and more ready to run to her than are Western babies” (Tuan 24).

Tuan believes that human beings are motivated to endow places with meanings and this process of giving meaning to places is strongly affected by the society the individuals belong to. Although he acknowledges the part an individual’s personal consciousness and condition plays in his/her idea of a place as seen in his examples of a baby, a prisoner and a bedridden old man differing in their idea of ascending stairs (52), he puts more emphasis on the idea that culture and society highly influence the interpretation of space: “Space is an abstract term for a complex set of ideas. People of different cultures differ in how they divide up their world, assign values to its parts and measure them” (34). To illustrate his point, he talks about how Americans have embraced the open plains of the West as a sign of freedom and opportunity, whereas the Russian peasants associated large open areas with despair, inhibition and the indifference of nature towards man’s suffering (56). He strikingly sums up how personal feelings and ideas regarding space and place usually yield to socially and culturally accepted and embraced ideas: “The fleeting intimacies of direct experience and the true quality of a place often escape notice because the head is packed with shopworn ideas. The data of the senses are pushed under in favour of what one is taught to see and admire. Personal experience yields to socially approved views . . . the most obvious and public aspects of an environment” (Tuan 146-147). To exemplify his point, Tuan cites Robert Pirsig’s observation of how tourists see Crater Lake in Oregon, matching it with the pictures of the place they have seen

55 elsewhere earlier, and not reconceptualising it in relation to their own experience of the place:

. . . we stop and . . . the small crowd of tourists holding cameras and children yelling, ‘Don’t go too close!’ . . . see the Crater Lake with a feeling of ‘Well, there it is,’ just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at all this, just a feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to. You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind. [n.:17 Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 341]8 (Tuan 147)

In addition to holding such an idea, Tuan also acknowledges the existence “of shared traits that transcend cultural peculiarities and may therefore reflect the general human condition” (5). He illustrates this by referring to the common view which considers the sky “the abode of the Supreme Being, or as identical with him” (37), an idea which he finds as universal as any religious belief among mankind. He also alludes to the common view that regards space as a symbol of prestige: “The ‘big man’ occupies and has access to more space than lesser beings” (158). In this regard, he also refers to the fact that even though cultures differ from one another in their elaboration of spatial system, the vocabularies of these systems and the logic they are set up on are mostly related to the structure of human body. He exemplifies his point by talking about two bodily positions “upright” and “prone” which yield different meanings in the human world and which are commonly used to convey these meanings. While the upright position is assertive and aloof, the prone position is perceived as submissive. A person takes on his/her full stature in the upright position: “The word ‘stand’ is the root for a large cluster of related words which include ‘status,’ ‘stature,’ ‘statute,’ ‘estate,’ and ‘institute.’ They all imply achievement and order” (38). According to Tuan, it is for this reason that significant

8 Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: William Morrow, 1974, 341.

56 buildings are set upon platforms, and tall buildings imply achievement and order because they are usually considered to be the ones that require highly developed technical skills in architecture: “Of monuments this is perhaps invariably true: a tall pyramid or victory column commands greater esteem than a shorter one (38). The same binary opposition can be observed in front and back spaces. Frontal space is mainly visual, vivid and much larger than the back space which we can only experience through non-visual clues. While the frontal space is seen and therefore revealed, back space is dark even when the sun shines because it cannot be totally seen. Therefore, on the temporal plane, frontal space is regarded as future whereas back space is thought as past. The front space embodies dignity and the rear represents profane as inferior beings come behind in the shadow of their superiors (40).

The middle part of Tuan’s book explores a variety of themes ranging from the body, the experience of crowding, knowledge and ability, to myth. Tuan, in the following chapters, also brings the idea of time into his discussion. He reveals how, in the process of interpretation, time and space go hand in hand. As he claims, language itself demonstrates an intimate connection between people, space and time:

I am (or we are) here; here is now. You (or they) are there; there is then, and then refers to a time which maybe either the past or the future. “What happens then?” The “then” is the future. “It was cheaper then.” The “then” here is the past. Einst, a German word, means “once,” “once upon a time,” and “some day (in the future).” Personal pronouns are tied not only to spatial demonstratives (this, that, here, there), but also to the adverbs of time “now” and “then.” Here implies there, now implies then. (126-127)

In this regard, he summarizes the relationship between time, space and place as the one in which time is perceived as the flow while place is conceived as pause. In this line of thinking, human time is marked by a number of stages just as human space is marked by pauses. To illustrate how time, space and place are thus closely connected to each other, he talks about how many legends and fairy tales use “long ago” and “far away” as their opening words relating them and how vacationers associate far- away places with timelessness:

57 “Long ago and far away” are the opening words of many legends and fairy tales. Associating a remote place with a remote past is a way of thinking that the Hopi share with other peoples . . . Antiquity is idealized as the time when the gods still walked the earth . . . far removed from the secular experiences of time. Secular time imposes constraints . . . The founding ancestors and heroes of the mythic world . . . lived in a timeless past. Timelessness is another quality of distant places . . . The European mind . . . envisions atemporal Isles of the Blest, Edens, and Utopias in remote and inaccessible places. (121-122)

He also adds to this relation by pointing to the desire common among vacationers to go as far away as possible from their homes, for they perceive remote resorts as removed from the burdens of time (122). He then asserts that the same feeling of getting rid of the boundaries of time emerges when one dances. An individual feels comfortable only when he/she steps forward. Stepping backwards normally makes one uncomfortable. According to Tuan, dancing accompanied by music evades “historical time and oriented space”: “When people dance they move forward, sideways, and even backward with ease. Music and dance free people from the demands of purposeful goal directed life, allowing them to live briefly in what Erwin Straus calls ‘presentic’ unoriented space” (129). Another example he provides regarding the relation between time and space is the association between the notions “inland,” “source,” “center,” or “core” with the idea of “origin,” “beginning,” or “past time.” In such a view, going up a river heading to its source symbolically means going back to “the beginning of one’s own life; and in the case of the Nile, to the birthplace of mankind” (126).

Tuan investigates the implications of space and place, which he describes as the “basic components of the lived world” (3) with regard to the perspective of experience. He starts by claiming that space is an abstract consideration and when we ‘know’ a place, we endow it with value: “In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place. “Space” is more abstract than “place.” What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Introduction 6). According to Tuan, this valuation can happen in positive and negative ways such as being attracted to or repelled by a place as it

58 happens in our relations with objects around us. He concludes his discussion by providing a definition of place: “Place is a special kind of object. It is a concretion of value, though not a valued thing that can be handled or carried about easily; it is an object in which one can dwell” (12). Despite his division of space and place, he emphasizes that they are closely co-dependent and they rely on one another. Tuan argues that to define space one must be able to move from one place to another; however, in order for a place to exist, it needs a space, which proves his idea that these two ideas are dependent upon one another.

Another important distinction that Tuan finds between place and space is related to the feelings of security and freedom associated with place and space respectively:

Space is a common symbol of freedom in the Western world. Space lies open; it suggests the future and invites action. On the negative side, space and freedom are a threat. A root meaning of the word “bad” is “open.” To be open and free is to be exposed and vulnerable. Open space has no trodden paths and signposts. It has no fixed pattern of established human meaning; it is like a blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed. Enclosed and humanized space is place. Compared to space, place is a calm center of established values. Human beings require both space and place. Human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom. In open space one can become intensely aware of place; and in the solitude of a sheltered place the vastness of space beyond acquires a haunting presence. (54)

As seen in this quotation, for Tuan while space is open and implies freedom and possibility, place is confined, restricted and safe. He maintains that freedom is one of the innate human desires and, particularly in the west, space is symbolically associated with freedom, which is at the same time paralleled with a sense of threat, exposure and vulnerability; and this sense of vulnerability may result from the fact that open space might have never been occupied and is therefore completely unknown. Such unknown space does not embody or resound with established patterns of human meaning and it therefore awaits the imposition of human meaning.

Regarding the perceptions of home that individuals possess, Tuan shares Bachelard’s idea that “home is an intimate place” (144). According to Tuan, our experiences are

59 intimate, personal and private at home, and he draws an affinity between our attachment to home and to homeland. He claims that our attachment to homeland is intense since “it is a characteristic of the symbol-making human species that its members can become passionately attached to places of enormous size, such as a nation-state, of which they can have only limited direct experience” (18). In this regard, he also contends that people are inclined to consider their homeland to be the centre of the world: “The prestige of the center is well established. People everywhere tend to regard their own homeland as the ‘middle place,’ or the center of the world. Among some people there is also the belief, quite unsupported by geography, that they live at the top of the world, or that their sacred place is at the earth’s summit” (38-39). He believes that such an attachment to land or space is a common human emotional behaviour; it is an enforcement of identity. Our city or land is our source of nourishment; it is feminine and it is the motherland. “Place is an archive of fond memories and splendid achievements . . . place is permanent and hence reassuring to man, who sees frailty in himself and chance and flux everywhere” (154). In that respect, he also adds to his discussion of home and nation by pointing to the human tendency of othering those people or nations that do not belong to the same groups or categories as themselves:

Distance is distance from self . . . I am always here, and what is here I call this. In contrast with the here where I am, you are there and he is yonder. What is there or yonder I call that . . . A distinction that all people recognize is between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ We are here; we are this happy breed of men. They are there; they are not fully human and they live in that place. Members within the we-group are close to each other, and they are distant from members of the outside (they) group. (47-50)

He claims that no matter how plain and short of architectural or historical glamour, their hometown means a lot to its residents and they highly resent outsiders’ criticism of it. According to him, people everywhere possess a feeling of yearning for a home. He illustrates his point by his assertion that nomads such as migrant workers and seamen even desire a permanent place as an anchor for their imagination when they

60 are far away from their own country or at sea. He writes of seamen, quoting Robert Davis9:

They had a craving for a headquarters somewhere along the shore, a place where they could leave their trunk, if they had one; a place to which they could project their minds, wherever they might wander, and visualize the position of the furniture, and imagine just what the inmates of the place were doing at the different hours of the day; a place to which they could send a picture postcard or bring back a curio; a place to which they could always return and be sure of a welcome. (Tuan 158)

The ugliness of home or hometown does not mean anything to its residents since it is full of their intimate memories and experiences. Moreover, its landmarks and buildings of public significance such as monuments, cemetery or shrines all serve to enforce individuals’ sense of identity and their feelings of belonging and loyalty to it. In this respect, Tuan’s ideas regarding the designed environment and architecture echo Lefebvre’s ideas regarding mental space in that they serve dominant ideologies by handing down the desired long-established traditions:

The designed environment serves an educational purpose. In some societies the building is the primary text for handing down a tradition, for presenting a view of reality. To a non-literate people the house may be not only a shelter but also a ritual place and the locus of economic activity. Such a house can communicate ideas even more effectively than can ritual. Its symbols form a system and are vividly real to the family members as they pass through the different stages of life. (112)

Embracing the same humanistic perspective on space, Christopher Tilley centres his investigation on the notion of place in his discipline, archaeology. He claims that place in human geography and archaeology was considered to be a different category from space as a simple surface for action until the 1960s (Tilley 9). Starting from 1970s onward, the reconceptualization of human geography and archaeology has produced a new and a more complex understanding regarding space and place in

9 Robert Davis, Some Men of the Merchant Marine. Columbia University Press, 1907. qtd in M. Wood, Paths of Loneliness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1953, p. 156.

61 these fields. According to this complex understanding, space is “a medium rather than a container for action, something that is involved in action and cannot be divorced from it” and there are different spaces rather than a single absolute space (10). For Tilley, there are various spaces such as somatic, perceptual, existential, architectural, or cognitive space, all of which yield differing spatial levels to be experienced by individuals as part of their subjective perception of place (15-17). He especially puts emphasis on the particularity of place and how it is connected to the human experience:

People are immersed in a world of places which the geographical imagination aims to understand and recover – places as contexts for human experience, constructed in movement, memory, encounter and association. There may be a strong affection for place (topophilia) or aversion (topophobia), but places are always far more than points or locations, because they have distinctive meanings and values for persons. Personal and cultural identity is bound up with place; a topoanalysis is one exploring the creation of self-identity through place. Geographical experience begins in places, reaches out to others through spaces, and creates landscapes or regions for human existence. (15)

As seen, Tilley proposes that human experience is place-conscious because place is “about situatedness in relation to identity and action” (18) and place-consciousness may lead to experiencing different feelings such as topophilia or topophobia.

2.2.3 Phenomenological Understandings of Space and Gaston Bachelard

Both Tuan’s and Tilley’s views on the subjectivity of human experience in place lead us to the phenomenological tradition, whose aim is to unfold the ways in which human subjects experience the world. Their phenomenological line of thought regarding place is quite obvious from their emphasis on place as a thing that defines human experience. In this regard, it was during the early periods of the twentieth century that place received critical attention as a phenomenon with well-known philosophers including Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s interest in place is influential in his understanding of issues such as being, art, and language as exemplified in his work Being and Time (1927). In his phenomenological theory Being or Dasein is

62 utilized “in all knowing and predicating, in every relation to beings and in every relation to oneself” (44) and he claims that contemplating Being requires a conscious recognition of our spatial relations. For Heidegger, the notion of Being there helps him question the spatiality of Being, and Being as “selfshowing in itself” (76) employs spatial references. His understanding of the spatiality of Dasein does not point to a mere physical dimension, which means Heidegger does not plainly propose that place denotes the “where” of an object, but rather that it shows the way in which Being is a part of the world: “Dasein tends to understand its own Being in terms of that being to which it is essentially, continually, and most closely related –the ‘world’” (58).

Maurice Merleau Ponty is another prominent theorist who adopts a phenomenological approach which regards place as an important category of spatial and corporeal dimensions. In his Phenomenology of Perception (1945) he focuses his analysis on human perception and how it is demonstrated by means of “the organic relations between subject and space” (293). He believes that space is “not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things become possible” (284). Space as a concept is “always already constituted” (293), thereby always already oriented, enabling human perception. Oriented space necessitates the position of human beings in the world, a position of bodily, spatial and corporeal existence: “any perception of a thing, a shape, or a size as real, any perceptual constancy refers back to the positing of a world and a system of experience in which my body is inescapably linked with phenomena” (353). To illustrate the corporeal dimension of perception as well as the spatiality in the process, he points out how the human body arranges its position in differing contacts with phenomena such as light:

Taking up our abode in a certain setting of colour, with the transposition which it entails, is a bodily operation, and I cannot effect it otherwise than by entering into the new atmosphere, because my body is my general power of inhabiting all the environments which the world contains, the key to all those transpositions and equivalences which keep it constant. Thus, lighting is merely one element of a complex structure, the others being the organization

63 of the field as our body contrives to it, and the thing illuminated in its constancy. (363)

As Casey suggests, for Merleau Ponty “the human body is never without a place or that place is never without (its own actual or virtual) body; he also shows that the lived body is itself a place. Its very movement, instead of effecting a mere change of position, constitutes place, brings it into being” (Casey 235), which means that place is not solely the physical area that the body guides itself in, but also the lived body itself.

Another critical phenomenological understanding of space was developed by Gaston Bachelard, whose ideas are employed in the analysis part of this study. Considered to be one of the leading philosophers of Europe, Gaston Bachelard is a philosopher and the author of The Poetics of Space (1957) in addition to many other influential books. During his career as a philosopher and scholar of scientific methods of observation, experimentation, analysis and reasoning, Bachelard decided to adopt a new approach by studying the subjectivity of the “individual consciousness” (Introduction xix) expressed in his own imagination and poetic imagery as well as through the imaginations and poetic imagery of poets and writers, in order to explore a reality that is not subject to conventional methods of reasoning. Bachelard believed that imagination is a defining quality of human nature and the fact that poetic imagery is not dependent on the rules of logic does not lessen its reality. He insistently emphasizes “how freely the imagination acts upon space, time and elements of power” (112). He refers to the fact that space, time or any other notion captured by the imagination does not remain unchanged or indifferent to “the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in . . . with all the partiality of the imagination” (3). In this respect, he rejects regarding a house that has been lived in as an inert box, claiming that such a house transcends merely being a geometrical or physical space.

His Poetics of Space is a phenomenological interrogation of the meanings of lived spaces which dominate poetry: intimate spaces such as rooms within a house, a

64 drawer, a night dresser, and spaces with wide expansion such as vistas and woods. In this book he introduces his concept of “topoanalysis”, which he describes as the systematic psychological study of the places of our intimate lives. He seems to prioritize space over time in the acquisition of knowledge of intimacy:

Here space is everything, for time ceases to quicken memory. Memory . . . does not record concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word. We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed. We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness. The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in and through space . . . Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are. To localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others . . . For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates. (Bachelard 9)

In this regard, Bachelard regards the house as the most intimate of all spaces, claiming that it “protects the daydreamer;” therefore, understanding the house is, for him, a way to understand the soul (42). He maintains that our souls are also abodes of our memories and experiences: “And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to abide within ourselves” (Introduction xxxvii). He proceeds to explore the home as the embodiment of the soul through the images which are found in poetry. He puts forward the idea that the house has both unity and complexity, it is composed of memories and experiences, its different parts produce different sensations; however, it yields an unchanging and intimate experience of living. He basically proposes a vertical image of the house created by the opposition between the attic and basement which represent, for him, rationality and irrationality respectively: the attic protects us from the weather and makes the whole structure of the house apparent, which makes it a metaphor for the clarity of mind while the basement is the darker, subterranean and irrational entity of the house. Home objects are also charged with mental experience: drawers are places full of secrets while cabinets open to reveal different worlds and corners enable us to “hide or withdraw into ourselves . . . a symbol of solitude for the imagination” (136).

65 Bachelard asserts that the house, particularly when it is evoked in relation to childhood, can function as an indicator of a psychic state since “the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are built variations on a fundamental theme” (15). He claims that the house we were born in is even physically inscribed in us. Even after very long time we do not trip over that high step or we find our way in that particular attic. Moreover, to illustrate how the house reveals our psychic state, Bachelard makes use of a study conducted by two psychologists who studied drawings of houses made by children from different nations. Their assumption and the finding of the study are that if the child is happy, he will “succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations . . . It will have the right shape” and there will certainly be a clue about its inner strength such as a soft smoke coming from the roof, warm indoors, and a big fire burning inside (72). On the other hand, an unhappy child will draw a house implying his/her distress and misery such as the ones produced by “Polish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupation during the last war. One child, who had been hidden in a closet every time there was an alert, continued to draw narrow, cold, closed houses long after those evil times were over” (72).

Claiming that “the poetics of the house” points to the value of an intimate space that protects the dreamer from mutability (53), Bachelard maintains that the house not only involves but also constitutes the memory of childhood and he further asserts that its characteristic as a shelter and refuge has been frequently associated with the comforting maternal body. In this regard, Bachelard quotes the following lines by Milosz, in which the mother and the house image are closely tied: “(I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh, House. / House of the lovely dark summers of my childhood)”10 (Bachelard 45). He contends that our lives begin secure, warm and

10 O. V. de Milosz, 1 877- 1939.

66 enclosed in the “bosom of the house” (7). When we think about the house we were conceived in, we experience this blissful warmth and the feelings of comfort, intimacy, harmony, unity and protection again. He contends that this comforting, safe and harmonious home is constructed by “the housewife” who “awakens furniture” by constant polishing while her husband “builds a house from the outside” without knowing about this “wax civilization” (68). In addition to adopting such an essentialist idea, which naturalizes the division between female/interior and male/exterior, Bachelard also suppresses women’s labour in the household by claiming that this housewifery is beneficial for women because it “cheers” their “heart” instead of exhausting their mind and body (81). In this regard, as it is contended by several critics such as Henri Lefebvre, Bachelard’s construction of domestic space in terms of timelessness, stasis, order, and maternity, contrasting with the image of changeable, social, and historical public space, embodies and conveys a system of spaces that maintains unequal power relations not only between different genders but also between different classes and nationalities by naturalizing the social relations, conflicts, and tensions that exist in domestic and public space.

As Casey maintains, phenomenological perspectives on space still render the idea of place an obscure category open to discussion rather than yielding a comprehensive definition of the concept. He believes that this obscurity of place is what has best demonstrated its nature and drawn the attention of Western philosophers since classical times. He claims that place as a philosophical notion has always been devalued due to its perceived characteristics including its givenness, ordinariness and opacity. In his The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (1997), Casey attempts to indicate how restrictive it can be to regard place as an ordinary experience. Pointing to the fact that place is constantly with us, he believes that it is very much expected that it will be taken for granted. He believes that another reason for such a dismissal of thinking about place is that place is thought to be a priori of our existence which we cannot choose as we cannot in the case of our existence. According to Casey, the concept of place is prioritised in the classical philosophy with Plato’s understanding of it as a category which is “ever-lasting” or “always in

67 being” (49). In Plato’s understanding space or chōra is an entity without which creation is impossible, whereas place or topos is a matrix for everything that exists in the world (Casey 48). Casey interprets this matrix as “a place or medium in which something is bred, produced, or developed,” or “a place or point of origin and growth” (24) in Plato’s thought system. Casey believes that in Plato’s understanding place is not “strictly material in character” (32) as it is thought to be “more like a mirror of the physical than a physical thing itself” (32-33). According Casey, Aristotle transforms this metaphysical notion of space by regarding place “as a unique and nonreducible feature of the physical world” (70), attributing physical qualities to the concept. In Aristotle’s system, “without place, things would not only fail to be located; they would not even be things: they would have no place to be the things they are” (Casey 71); he thus makes place one of the material features which constitute and define entities, and adds a novel dimension to the investigation of place by recognizing the bodily element inherent to the nature of place. As Casey emphasizes, since classical times the importance of place has been re-established on very different bases including bodily, architectural, psychical or sexual from the ones in the classical understanding in which its primacy was mainly physical, metaphysical or cosmological. Even though these different bases defining why place must be regarded as a critical category have changed throughout the history of philosophy, as Casey maintains, place is still an obscure term for many modern and postmodern philosophers, which will yield more studies on the concept, giving us the opportunity to comprehend its importance for human beings more.

Considering all of these perceptions and ideas of space provided above, this dissertation will mainly employ three of these important theorists regarding their understanding and explanations of space. Utilizing Bachelard’s ideas particularly in exposing how Woolf reflects and simultaneously challenges the dominant social codes ascribed to places particularly regarding gender in her society, this study will also make use of theorists who have addressed the issue of space with reference to social, cultural, economic, political and material understandings of space. For these purposes, the thesis will have recourse to some of the ideas of Michel Foucault, who

68 challenged received notions that construct space as “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile” in the late 1960s (Foucault 70). Pointing to the devaluation of space throughout history, he argues for the crucial conjunction of time and space in the formation of modernity, knowledge and power. The thesis will also frequently refer to the work of Henri Lefebvre who proposed a new understanding of modernity and everyday life through a reconceptualization of social space. In this study the use of the term social space is built primarily upon The Production of Space in which his account of the production of space is dependent on his interest in contemporary theoretical discourses such as post-structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis together with his attempts to incorporate a Nietzschean perspective into a Marxist framework. In addition to these prominent theorists, this dissertation will also employ the ideas of Yi-Fu Tuan whose humanist geography effectively examines the ways in which human beings think about space, how they develop feelings of attachment to home and nation and how the sense of time, culture and society influences the feelings about space and place.

CHAPTER 3

REWRITING DOMESTIC SPACES IN THE VOYAGE OUT, MRS DALLOWAY, TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, AND THE YEARS

A close investigation into Virginia Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction reveals her constant preoccupation with physical and mental spaces that are attributed with certain spatial codes serving the powerful ideologies of her society and time. Even though her works reflect and adopt dominant social discourses regarding spaces of her era, they also disrupt this socio-spatial hierarchy by remoulding both private or domestic and public spaces, through her understanding and representation of social space, as multifaceted and alterable. Woolf positions both the private and the public spaces of her society within a cultural and historical realm, which is in line with Lefebvre’s conceptualization of social space as an area that is not occupied by fixed and dead objects and ideas but by dynamic and conflicting ones. In this way Woolf’s literary practices critically expose the often-unrepresented experiences and perspectives of the marginalized in terms of gender, class and nationality. This part of the dissertation focuses on the ways Woolf’s novels utilize domestic space to undermine an inherited ideology of domestic space that aimed to sustain the patriarchal, class-stratified and imperialist social system by fostering a uniform image of domestic space as free of conflicts and resistance. While doing that, it demonstrates how Lefebvrian Woolf’s novels act in representing domestic space as socially, culturally, and ideologically constructed. In this respect, it also investigates her novels regarding their recourse to Foucault’s similar ideas concerning space and its critical role in the production and implementation of knowledge and power in a society. Focusing on the construction of domestic space by the powerful ideologies

70 of society and time, this part of the thesis also reveals how Bachelardian Woolf’s novels appear in attributing domestic sphere with fixed and essentialist ideas particularly regarding different genders. However, it also shows their ultimate Lefebvrian attitude towards space in that social space is heterogeneous, plural, dynamic and open to change. Arising from such an attitude towards space, it also reveals how the representations of space and place in Woolf’s novels are in line with Tuan’s ideas concerning their scrupulous portrayal of space and place in relation to human beings and the important role these concepts play in individuals’ lives, foregrounding a formerly-neglected notion – space – in people’s lives and in fiction as well.

3.1. An Investigation into Spatial Codes Attributed to Domestic Space by Patriarchy

As scholars such as Lefebvre and Tuan note, every society conceptualizes and produces its spaces in line with its dominant ideologies and social order. In a patriarchal society the physical and conceptual separation of private/domestic and public spaces play an influential role in maintaining the patriarchal social system. Up until and through Woolf’s lifetime, as Snaith remarks, men generally occupied and took control over places outside the home, while some parts of domestic space were considered the domain of women (Snaith 8); that is to say, women’s access to public space was limited and the lives of middle class women were centred on the home, although even there only the very wealthy had any place that was entirely their own. Armstrong asserts that this middle-class ideology of domesticity is based on the assumption that there is a dichotomy between home and the outside, which he terms the “female domain,” and the “male domain” which “governs the marketplace” (9-10). Langland points to the same distinction between spheres and emphasizes the perception which constructed the house as a private haven with its woman, as opposed to the outside world characterized by commerce and rivalry (291). Such a construction of the ideal domestic space as a place of peace, harmony and unity for the family, in opposition to an outside sphere that women could construe as a place

71 of terror, hostility and uncertainty (and which should be governed by men) can be clearly observed in the Ruskin’s characteristically Victorian delineation of the home as well:

This is the true nature of home – it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed . . . to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home. (145)

In addition to this gendered separation of home and outside, as Elizabeth Langland points out, during the Victorian Period there were even spaces at home – this was in the middle class home – “coded as masculine or feminine” (295). She goes on to exemplify her claim by noting that still in Woolf’s day and age, where the houses were large enough to comprise such rooms, drawing rooms, sitting rooms and boudoirs were regarded as feminine spaces, while smoking rooms, study rooms, and billiard rooms were designed for male activities and thus considered to belong to the male sphere (Langland 295). This distinction between interior spaces of home is evidently related to the activities conducted in these rooms being classified in terms of gender, an example of which was “tea drinking,” in drawing rooms, that was seen as a feminine activity (Kowaleski-Wallace 131). Kowaleski-Wallace states that during the Victorian Period a “respectable woman pouring tea” was regarded as “the power” to counterbalance the rough world outside (134). Langland, on the other hand, draws attention to this separation of interior spaces of home regarding how these spaces were decorated in accordance with the tastes of their female or male occupiers: “Drawing rooms, for example, were regarded as feminine and usually decorated with ‘spindly gilt or rosewood, and silk or chintz,’ while the dining rooms, considered masculine, required ‘massive oak or mahogany and Turkey carpets’ (Life 292)11” (Langland 295).

11 Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978.

72 Resenting the age-long lack of access to some of the areas of life that were barred to women, Woolf’s novels and other writings reveal the workings and political implications of gendered space and place, consistently questioning and opposing this spatialized aspect of patriarchal discourse. As Snaith puts forward “the conceptual dichotomy between public and private spaces . . . was one which captured her attention, to be reworked and questioned, rather than accepted wholesale in any particular form” (Snaith 1). Therefore, she investigates and problematizes the position of women in her society through her analyses of the motives behind the male/female dichotomy, which can be seen occasionally in her works: “Woolf was interested in the underlying psychological and economic causes of masculine dominance and feminine repressed anger or acquiescence, and she used her powers of observation and divination to probe depths the earlier feminist writers had left largely unplumbed” (Zwerdling 216). In this respect, it can be claimed that engaging in a persistent interest in conveying domestic space, Woolf rewrites the conventions of the novel, where the “negative” domestic space that was a background in the male- dominated mental space of conventional Victorian novels suddenly becomes the “positive” (foregrounded) space in these female dominated perspectives.

Woolf conspicuously criticises the patriarchal social system of her country in A Room of One’s Own. She remarks that one can understand, even from a small newspaper clipping, that her country is under patriarchal rule: “with the exception of the fog he [the symbolic male] seemed to control everything” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas 43). Woolf partly blames women for colluding in and inflating the idea of male superiority upon which patriarchy is based: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (45). She underscores the same idea frequently in her novels, for instance in The Voyage Out when Terence Hewet says, “I believe we must have the sort of power over you that we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote” (233). However, Woolf also implies the possibility of women

73 overthrowing or at least overcoming patriarchal dominance: “For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas 46).

Critical of the limited space assigned to women of her society by the middle-class ideology of domesticity, Virginia Woolf offers a reconfiguration of the female domain. She calls for room for women, which can be called a “differential space” in Lefebvre’s terms, a conceptual and political dimension where women could pursue their desires and interests away from the responsibilities imposed upon them by the patriarchy. She also regards writing as a way of making a woman’s voice heard. Even though Woolf seems to demand private domains for women in A Room of One’s Own, what she actually desires is not only a physical refuge but also a social and political space where writing women will be free from their restricting domestic duties. This is “a liberating private space, an active choice, and, importantly, it is from the room that the woman will gain access to the public sphere through writing” (Snaith 3). Further, she points to the problem of the lack of representation of women in historical records in “Women and Fiction”, when she observes that “very little is known about women. The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female” (Selected Essays 132). She claims that when a woman writes, male discourse can be called into question: “when a woman comes to write a novel, she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values – to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important” (136). Considering the interest Woolf has in making women of her society heard, it is not surprising that in her factual as well as fictional writings she frequently touches upon the idea of privacy as a precondition for the pursuit of interests for women, and she demonstrates the change to a woman’s perspective through her reconceptualization of spaces.

Woolf’s works are particularly characterized by her keen awareness that the physical and conceptual separation of private or domestic and public spaces was integral to sustaining the dominant patriarchal social order of her society. In her novels, Woolf’s

74 practices anticipate two of Lefebvre’s significant ideas: that space is socially and ideologically constructed, and that language as well as knowledge is also “a space in which the subject may take up a position and speak of the objects with which he deals in his discourse” (Lefebvre 19). In these works, she demonstrates how domestic space is established and maintained by the patriarchal system of her society, mainly through her novels’ revealing the ideas of characters, and through scenes in which male and female characters occupy different spaces in the same place and engage in different activities. An example of such a representation of domestic space can be seen in To the Lighthouse, where Mr Ramsay’s ideas of home and outside bear strong affinities with the construction of these spaces by the dominant ideologies. His ideas are conveyed in a reported interior monologue when he is on the boat with his remaining, adult children on the way to the lighthouse: “He liked that men should labour and sweat on the windy beach at night; pitting muscle and brain against the waves and the wind; he liked men to work like that, and women to keep house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors, while men were drowned, out there in a storm” (233). In another part of the novel, the same ideas are given in a passage of free indirect reporting which simultaneously conveys the typical organization of the rooms of a Victorian household and implicitly echoes (or, rather, pre-empts) Bachelard’s idea of women’s identification with the construction of the home: “it was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed . . . and all the rooms of the house made full of life - - the drawing room; behind drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them nurseries; they must be furnished, they must be filled with life” (56). Similar but stronger and even more essentialist ideas regarding genders and their so-called appropriate spaces can be found in The Voyage Out, Woolf’s debut novel that explores the limits of women’s freedom of movement away from domestic space. Perhaps more than all, Richard Dalloway in this novel has the most conventional and essentialist ideas regarding men, women and the spaces they should occupy in his society:

75 “I never allow my wife to talk politics,” he said seriously . . . It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals. If I have preserved mine, as I am thankful to say that in great measure I have, it is due to the fact that I have been able to come home to my wife in the evening and to find that she has spent her day in calling, music, play with the children, domestic duties – what you will; her illusions have not been destroyed. She gives me the courage to go on. The strain of public life is very great” (66).

In the following pages, he likens English society to a “vast machine” (67) in which all its members occupy a different fixed space engaging in specified sets of activities, all of which contribute to the functioning of the system:

Look at it in this way, Miss Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine; we citizens are parts of that machine; some fulfil more important duties; others (perhaps I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure parts of the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw fails in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperilled (67).

As seen, his image of society as a machine only takes into consideration the physical and mental spaces mostly produced and conceived by the dominant ideologies, disregarding the presence and understanding of social space which is really lived, may be filled with resistance or protest, and can be changed by the individual.

Woolf’s novels’ representation of such patriarchal ideals are not limited to only Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and Richard Dalloway in The Voyage Out, although they comprise the best and most explicit examples of conveying such patriarchal ideas through a focus on space. Several other male characters express such ideas or demonstrate behaviour in line with these types of ideas: Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse who constantly calls into question women’s abilities or accomplishments, Hirst in The Voyage Out who makes insulting and condescending remarks about Rachel and women, or the contempt of Oxford dons for Miss Craddock’s academic skills in The Years.

Apart from these remarks, that expose the dominant spatial order and hierarchy of her characters’ society, Woolf scrupulously designs her novels to demonstrate how these commonly embraced ideas regarding men, women and space function in her

76 society. Investigations carried out in this part of the thesis have found out that Woolf’s fiction abounds in scenes in which women’s restricted lives in domestic sphere are contrasted with men’s more mobility outside and more privacy at home. In addition, referring back to what Stevanato claimed about Woolf’s fiction (which has been referred to in the theoretical chapters of this dissertation), it can be maintained that women are also often placed in liminal places such as by doorways, landings and windows, which are transitory or in-between spaces characterized by indeterminacy, ambiguity and potential for change. In this respect, The Years is one of Woolf’s most remarkable novels with regard to its abundance of socially and politically charged spaces and places, and its critical demonstrations of how space and place can serve as a means of social control (as put forward by Foucault) in a way that naturalizes fixed and unchanging boundaries as their defining characteristics.

The “1880” chapter reveals the Colonel Pargiter household with its members: Colonel Abel Pargiter, his wife Rose (sick on her deathbed), and their children (Eleanor, Edward, Morris, Milly, Delia, Martin, and Rose) residing at Abercorn Terrace in a respectable part of London. While two of the daughters (Milly and Delia) are shown as engaging in their daily and monotonous activity of staring at the teakettle, waiting for it to boil, and Eleanor (the eldest daughter) is shown coming in from outside, having done charity work, Colonel Abel and his son Martin are shown, separately, coming home, (Colonel from his club and his visit to his mistress and Martin from school) implying their wider access to public space. The narrative points out that two other sons are elsewhere: Edward is at Oxford and Morris is working at the Law Courts. Through this, the novel contrasts men’s freer movement between public and private spaces for the purposes of education and work with women’s entrapment—and even decease, as shown through the image of the dying mother Rose—in domestic space, exposing the gender politics of space. In an attempt to show this contrast between men and women regarding their spaces more effectively, Snaith in Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (2000) draws the attention to the difference between the Pargiter daughters and sons regarding their educational

77 opportunities and refers to the earlier version of the The Years, The Pargiters, that includes more details about the discrepancy in education (98). She remarks that The Pargiters makes specific references to the educational lives and goals of the Pargiter daughters, which are either excised or referred to only briefly in The Years (98). As an example, she talks about the fact that in The Years Milly’s interest in painting and her being banned from studying at the Slade due to her father’s concerns of morality are completely removed (98). Snaith continues by saying that the narrative of The Years also ambiguously and only briefly points to Delia’s music lessons when Eleanor tells her “Look here, Delia . . . you’ve only got to wait . . . until the Mama dies” (18) (Snaith 98). On the other hand, as she says, the narrator of The Pargiters gives information about the cost of the education of the children as well, pointing to the striking difference between them: ten years’ of schooling for three boys costing £900 a year as opposed to the £200 a year for four girls (96). Woolf expresses the same point about girls’ education being sacrificed in order to give their brothers more expensive education in Three Guineas, as well (Woolf 39). Snaith claims that Woolf’s reduction of these earlier details regarding the education of the Pargiter children helps increase the sense of monotony and boredom for daughters at home in The Years (99). As an obvious example of this, she compares a scene from these two novels. Asked to go and sit next to her mother in her sick room, Delia agrees, saying “I’ve nothing whatever to do” in The Years while in The Pargiters the same scene includes the debate about whose turn it is, since Delia has had two hours of music practice and Eleanor has been out all day (Snaith 99). As Snaith puts forward, omission of these details referring to the girl’s personal spaces of interest and activity adds to the published novel’s sense that they indeed had ‘nothing’ to do, and to the sense of monotony surrounding women’s lives at home in The Years.

In The Years the significance of place in maintaining patriarchal gender roles and relations can be even more obviously seen when Eleanor writes a letter to Edward, telling him about their dying mother and wanting him to contact her. It is significant that Morris takes her letter outside to the pillar box, not Eleanor: “Eleanor went to the front door with him . . . and stood holding it open while he went to the pillar box

78 . . . She remembered how she used to stand at the door when he was a small boy and went to a day school with a satchel in his hand. She used to wave to him; and when he got to the corner he always turned and waved back” (34). Snaith also makes use of this scene in her analysis of The Pargiters and The Years saying that it “reinforces the restrictions on Eleanor’s freedom,” and links it to education by portraying Eleanor’s watching of Morris’s freedom of education from the boundaries of home (101). Such images of women standing on the borders (which can be considered another example of liminal space) between the domestic and public spaces frequently appear in the novel, implying women as the gatekeepers of domestic space and the fixed nature of identity and place at Abercorn Terrace, but at the same time the possibility for a progressive change. As Massey notes, the Pargiter household yields an image of home featured by, “stability and a reassuring boundedness” (169), which is invariably indicated by the narrative through the narrator’s and characters’ comments, and through descriptions of domestic space and what the characters are doing there. As another instance, the narrator talks about the Pargiter house as a place where “the world outside seemed thickly and entirely cut off” (18) or where photographs of male ancestors like “Uncle Horace in his uniform” decorate the walls (20), drawing attention to the physical and mental production of the home as a secure, stable, and harmonious place suited for women through the presiding, patriarchal social system.

While pointing out this distinction between domestic and public spaces, Woolf’s novels invariably also expose how the patriarchy assigns different spaces to women and men within domestic space: while men are frequently shown as enjoying the privilege of possessing a study where they can be alone and engage in their professions; women occupy the drawing room and dining room, which are more public rooms and do not guarantee them any assurance of uninterrupted privacy in which they may pursue their personal interests or even impersonal activities. For example, Eleanor, in The Years, is shown to be interrupted several times by the other members of the family asking for things while she tries to do the accounts: “Eleanor, who had taken to her books again, looked up disturbed. ‘Eight times eight . . .’ she

79 said aloud. ‘What’s eight times eight?’” (18). Similarly, in To the Lighthouse, while Mrs Ramsay is never shown on her own in the house during the daytime, and repeatedly portrayed as sitting at the drawing room window (another liminal space) with her son James, Mr Ramsay is shown to have the opportunity to “slam… his private door” on them (22). Mrs Ramsay is only on her own, knitting or reading a book, when she goes to her bedroom after the last activity of her daily family life, making sure that the children are asleep in the nursery, is over. Another such an example can be seen in The Voyage Out in which the narrator remarks that special efforts are made by the servants and Helen not to disturb Helen’s husband in his study:

. . . one room which possessed a character of its own because the door was always shut, and no sound of music or laughter issued from it. Everyone in the house was vaguely conscious that something went on behind that door, and without in the least knowing what it was, were influenced in their own thoughts by the knowledge that if they passed it the door would be shut, and if they made a noise Mr Ambrose inside would be disturbed . . . everyone was conscious that by observing certain rules, such as punctuality and quiet, by cooking well, and performing other small duties, one ode after another was satisfactorily restored to the world, and they shared the continuity of the scholar’s life. Unfortunately, as age puts one barrier between human beings, and learning another, and sex a third, Mr Ambrose in his study was some thousand miles distant from the nearest human being, who in this household was inevitably a woman. (Woolf 186)

His situation is sharply contrasted with that of Rachel who complains about being frequently interrupted in her room by unexpected visits without a knock on the door: “She never heard a knock at the door. It was burst impulsively open, and Mrs Dalloway stood in the room leaving the door open” (57). Dissatisfied with her lack of privacy while living with her father and aunts, Rachel enjoys a special benefit during her stay with the Ambroses: a private room: “Among the promises which Mrs Ambrose had made her niece . . . was a room cut off from the rest of the house, large, private – a room in which she could play, read, think, defy the world, a fortress as well as a sanctuary” (133). In addition to these examples in which the distinctions drawn between the rooms of home are clearly observed, it is quite striking to see that

80 the characters configure even the spaces of a ship in line with the patriarchal system of their home. In one of the early chapters of the novel, where they are on a ship to Santa Marina (a fictional British colony), the narrator presents Rachel and Mrs Ambrose observing Mr Ambrose and Mr Pepper:

They looked through a chink in the blind and saw that long cigars were being smoked in the dining-room; they saw Mr Ambrose throw himself violently against the back of his chair . . . In the dry yellow-lighted room Mr Pepper and Mr Ambrose were oblivious of all tumult; they were in Cambridge, and it was probably about the year 1875. “They’re old friends,” said Helen, smiling at the sight. “Now, is there a room for us to sit in?” Rachel opened a door. “It is more like a landing than a room,” she said. (11)

This scene can be interpreted with respect to Tuan’s ideas that an undifferentiated space becomes place when it is endowed with meanings by the individual consciousness, society or shared, general human traits, and it is usually the dominant ideology of a society that determines those spatial meanings. Here, these characters are in no particular country, floating on the sea in between distant geographic places, and this was a situation which, at the beginning of their voyage, they thought would make them free from all the restraints and rules of home or nation: “They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same exhilaration at their freedom ran through them all” (22). They nevertheless gradually apply the same social order and codes on the ship. Therefore, as seen, while the dining room (which happens to be the only room available to sit and converse in, on board) is occupied by the men after meals (as was conventional in English middle class homes), the women have no drawing room into which they can withdraw (as was conventional in England) and therefore cannot find space for themselves and are left with the only option of sitting in the transitional or liminal space of a landing.

As Son claims, Woolf’s non-fiction works often associate home and the mother through “the image of a provider of comfort, harmony, and stability” (Son 20). Woolf’s most comprehensive autobiographical writing A Sketch of the Past particularly focuses on the childhood home being linked with her mother:

81 Certainly there she was, in the very center of that great Cathedral space which was childhood; there she was from the very first . . . and . . . central. I suspect the word ‘central’ gets closest to the general feeling I had of living so completely in her atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as a person . . . She was the whole thing; Talland House was full of her; Hyde Park Gate was full of her (83).

In this regard it can be maintained that Woolf’s memoirs’ association between home, mother, and a sense of stability is in accordance with the ideas of Bachelard who asserts that the house not only contains but also constitutes the memory of childhood and that its virtue as a shelter and refuge has been often aligned with the comforting maternal body. This association between home, mother, stability, comfort and refuge had been promoted, perhaps even coined by Victorian intellectuals such as John Ruskin who considered the house as a container of childhood memories centred on the relationship with the mother, protecting her family from the chaos and fluidity outside (Marcus 83-84). However, as scholars such as Doreen Massey remark, all these associations about home and women are social and cultural constructions produced by the patriarchy which gives the duty of child-rearing entirely to women (Massey 166). Anticipating Lefebvre, Foucault and Tuan, and acknowledging that the discourse of domestic space is just a socio-cultural construction dictated by the dominant social order, Woolf’s novels disrupt this equation of private or domestic space with maternity, femininity, comfort, harmony, seclusion and changelessness by exposing the multiple meanings of domestic space (adopting a perspectivist attitude, which embraced different points of views and interpretations, as proposed by Nietzsche and Ortega), showing it as dynamic and alterable, and pointing to the home as a site of incessant and unrewarded toil of women and working class people, the confinement of women, and the conflicts that result from unequal relations and domination within it.

3.1.1 Disrupting the Equation of Domestic Space with Femininity, Comfort, Stability and Order in Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years

This part of the dissertation demonstrates how Woolf’s fiction negates the fixed construction of domestic space (by patriarchy) as essentially feminine, comfortable,

82 stable and ordered through a Lefebvrian and Tuanian understanding and portrayal of space as constructed by meanings that are subjective, heterogeneous, plural and ever- changing in relation to time, distance, individuals and society.

In Woolf’s fiction, even where the main female characters seem to accept the dominant social codes assigned to the physical and mental spaces of home, they also frequently imply their dissatisfaction with such a limited space by demonstrating their feelings of confinement. In this respect Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse is a conventional housewife who is at times preoccupied with the idea that everybody should get married and who mostly seems to accept the distinction of domestic and public space in her society. Woolf occasionally conveys Mrs Ramsay’s conventional personality by exposing her attempts at maintaining this separation of domestic and public space regarding genders. For example, in one part of the novel Mrs Ramsay, quite interestingly, attributes Mr Carmichael’s failure as a philosopher to his unsuccessful marriage, saying: “He should have been a great philosopher . . . but he had made an unfortunate marriage” (17), and she blames his wife for failing to provide him with a comfortable house:

He did not trust her. It was his wife’s doing. She remembered that iniquity of his wife’s towards him, which had made her turn to steel and adamant there, in the horrible little room . . . her own eyes had seen that odious woman turn him out of the house . . . she turned him out of the room. She said, in her odious way, “Now, Mrs Ramsay and I want to have a little talk together. (61)

Her apparently simplistic understanding of gender relations can also be seen when she says that she does not understand why Mr Carmichael does not treat her well even though she has given him a room in their house: “But what more could she have done? There was a sunny room given up to him” (62). Despite her portrayal as a woman who has embraced her designated space in society, Woolf does not reduce her character to a one-dimensional personality and shows the dissatisfaction of even such a conventional woman regarding her assigned space as one who is constantly defined in relation to others and to what she can give to others, but as a woman whose appearance and (socially imposed) limitations are integral to her role and perceived

83 identity. In one part of the novel, Mrs Ramsay associates herself with the lighthouse signalling the end of the day and says she feels extremely tired: “there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent” (56). Following this, she reveals her old desires to do more than just being a “private woman” of decorative looks, and to spend time finding solutions to social problems outside:

How could she help being ‘like that’ to look at? No one could accuse her of taking pains to impress . . . Nor was she domineering, nor was she tyrannical. It was more true about hospitals and drains and the dairy. About things like that she did feel passionately, and would, if she had the chance, have liked to take people by the scruff of their necks and make them see. No hospital on the whole island. It was a disgrace. Milk delivered at your door in London positively brown with dirt. It should be made illegal. A model dairy and a hospital up here—those two things she would have liked to do, herself. But how? With all these children? When they were older, then perhaps she would have time; when they were all at school. (84)

As seen, while Mrs Ramsay feels weariness within her assigned space of home (in which she does not have a holiday even when in their summer house, worrying continuously about the health and happiness of her children, providing not just food and rooms for her guests but also happiness and comfort for them, acting as a general helper of everyone and all good reasons as seen in her knitting for the lighthouse keeper’s son, and feeling responsible for maintaining her husband’s precarious balance of mind), subverting its physical and mental construction as a comfortable female space, she simultaneously challenges the conceptualization of public space as better suited for men to govern by pointing to the problems outside such as the lack of a hospital on the island or the quality of milk sold. In another example, she makes evident her discontent with her sphere by juxtaposing her life and lot with that of her husband and remarks that her inner life is separated from the one she shares with her family, implying that a private life of her own desires and interests is not compatible with her family life and domesticity:

She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on

84 one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it . . . (85)

Similar to Mrs Ramsay, Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway has a feeling of dissatisfaction with her place in life being limited to that of a society hostess, now that marriage and child-bearing are no longer concerns of hers at home. On her way to the florist to buy flowers for her party, probably for her drawing room, (which fits Langland’s earlier comments about the decorative concerns of female spaces), she feels regretful for her life, which she thinks, is not her own at all. It is also quite interesting that these grim feelings seem to be triggered by her walk around the city:

Oh if she could have had her life over again! . . . She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere . . . this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing – nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway. (8)

In addition to this dissatisfaction, in Woolf’s novels home provides reliable, uniform or consistent “comfort” to neither female nor male characters. Striking examples of such subversion of the notion of home abound in The Years in which the sick mother Rose Pargiter calls into question the Victorian discourse on home as “the place of peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division” particularly for women who reign there far away from the anxieties of the outside world (Ruskin 59). Even on her death bed, Rose remains preoccupied by her old domestic responsibilities: “Some gleam from the lamp outside made the white cloth look extremely white. ‘Another clean tablecloth!’ Mrs Pargiter murmured peevishly. ‘The expense, Delia, the expense – that’s what worries me’” (21). Similar kinds of worries can also be observed in To the Lighthouse in which Mrs Ramsay, on several occasions, worries about the shabbiness of the furniture at home or the expense of a new greenhouse roof, both of which concerns she hides from her husband: “people said he depended on her, when they must know of the two he was infinitely the more important, and what she gave the world, in comparison with what he gave, negligible.

85 But then again, it was the other thing too – not being able to tell him the truth, being afraid, for instance, about the greenhouse roof and the expense it would be” (58). As seen from these examples, these worries of women apparently challenge the idea of domestic space as separate from social and economic concerns of the public space, which echoes Lefebvre’s ideas regarding the interconnectedness of dominated space (spaces usually outside home such as governmental buildings, military buildings, fortifications or dams dominated by the ruling ideologies) and appropriated space (spaces such as home mainly modified by and serving the needs of a group that occupies it): “Private space is distinct from, but always connected with, public space . . . the outside space of the community is dominated, while the indoor space of family life is appropriated” (Lefebvre 174-175). It can be claimed that Woolf’s novels, in this way, unsettle the sharp distinction drawn between the domestic and public space by the dominant ideologies of society.

Not only the mothers but also all the other major female members of the families in Woolf’s novels have feelings of discomfort, discontent and entrapment in domestic space. In this respect it is perhaps Delia in The Years who most explicitly expresses her feelings of confinement at home. She locates the notions of beauty and freedom outside her restricting home: “Somewhere there’s beauty . . . somewhere there’s freedom” (13) and she particularly regards her dying mother as “an obstacle, a prevention, an impediment to life” (19). In a moment of extreme indignation with her mother for not dying, she finds relief in imagining herself free from home and all its restraints, talking in a public place in favour of liberty and justice just as Parnell called for liberty and justice for Ireland: “There must be a hall . . . crowded with people’s heads . . . She was on the platform; there was a huge audience; everybody was shouting, waving handkerchiefs, hissing and whistling. Then she stood up . . . Mr Parnell was by her side. ‘I am speaking in the cause of Liberty . . . Justice’” (20). Delia’s feelings of confinement at home seem to be shared by Eleanor, who appears to have taken over most of the roles of their dying mother without complaint. However, a close inspection of the narrative demonstrates that Eleanor is greatly burdened by her new role at home: “There was silence. Martin was asleep. Her

86 mother was asleep. As she passed the doors and went downstairs a weight seemed to descend on her . . . A blankness came over her. Where am I? she asked herself, staring at a heavy frame. What is that? She seemed to be alone in the midst of nothingness; yet must descend, must carry her burden” (33). It is perhaps because of these experiences of home that she sells their house after her father’s death and decides not to have a permanent house but to travel. Towards the end of the novel, when she is asked a question about whether she was suppressed at home in Abercorn Terrace, she quite strikingly remembers “a long dark drawing room” -- and she does not want to remember it: “A picture – another picture – had swum to the surface. There was Delia standing in the middle of the room; Oh my God! Oh my God! she was saying . . . and she herself was watching Morris – was it Morris? – going down the street to post a letter . . . I do not want to go back into my past, she was thinking. I want the present” (231).

In addition to these female characters who find the domestic sphere uncomfortable and restricting, only a few male characters – Mr Ramsay and William Bankes in To the Lighthouse and Martin in The Years – openly express negative feelings related to home. Mr Ramsay, on several occasions, remarks that he might have been more successful in his profession as a philosopher if he had not preferred marriage which he believes to come with a private and domestic life at home: “It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there, alone -- he broke off, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight children -- he reminded himself . . . Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said . . . That was a good bit of work on the whole -- his eight children” (99). His friend, William Bankes, also shares these ideas regarding Mr Ramsay’s career. In one part of the novel where he tries to prevent Lily from disparaging Mr Ramsay, William Bankes reflects upon his long lasting friendship with Mr Ramsay, particularly focusing on their youth. His vision of Mr Ramsay as heavily characterized by a kind of “solitude which seemed to be his natural air” (33) is suddenly interrupted by the image of “a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said ‘Pretty—pretty,’ . . . which showed his simplicity, his

87 sympathy with humble things” (33). William believes that their friendship actually ended at that moment, after which Mr Ramsay got married, leading them to different paths: “Begun long years ago, their friendship had petered out on a Westmorland road, where the hen spread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married” (34). It is quite important to note in these lines that William connects the hen’s spreading her wings over her chicks to Mr Ramsay’s getting married in that he cared for “simple” and “humble” things. This association of Mrs Ramsay with a hen protecting her chicks and being humble clearly demonstrates William’s perception of women as essentially maternal and inferior to men. He goes on to talk about what marriage has done to hamper Mr Ramsay’s professional and intellectual development and success:

The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder how they managed to contrive it all. Eight children! To feed eight children on philosophy . . . They gave him something—William Bankes acknowledged that . . . but they had also, his old friends could not but feel, destroyed something . . . Could one help noticing that habits grew on him? Eccentricities, weaknesses perhaps? It was astonishing that a man of his intellect could stoop so low as he did— but that was too harsh a phrase—could depend so much as he did upon people’s praise. (34-35)

As seen in these statements, William Bankes relates Mr Ramsay’s increasing lack of self-confidence about his work and his being too much dependent on what other people think and say about his work to his marriage that come with a private and domestic life at home, but also with all the responsibilities such kind of a life requires. Like Mr Ramsay and William Bankes, Martin, in The Years, remembering his childhood experiences at home, regards his childhood home as possessing “an abominable system . . . family life; Abercorn Terrace. No wonder the house would not let. It had one bathroom, and a basement; and there all those different people had lived, boxed up together, telling lies” (155).

Dissatisfied with their lot, even the predominantly conventional major female characters – Mrs Ramsay and Mrs Dalloway – show their discontent at home and use the social spaces of their houses such as dining rooms as more social gathering

88 places that bring in the outside world: through dinners (in Mrs Ramsay’s case) and parties (in Mrs Dalloway’s case), although they mostly cannot rebel against the restrictions they are trapped within in more radical ways. In this regard, both Mrs Ramsay and Mrs Dalloway want to achieve something, something “to fall back on” (To the Lighthouse 85), some kind of peace and a unity among people through such organizations. In contrast to characters such as Lily, who wants to achieve her own potential through her art, painting, which is portrayed as having a sphere outside home (“on the edge of the lawn” (To the Lighthouse 26)), Mrs Ramsay and Mrs Dalloway choose to make their lives more meaningful while staying within domestic space by achieving peace and unity among people and, in Mrs Ramsay’s case, being remembered for it as well, when she dies. This concern with achieving something and being remembered for it can be observed in Mrs Ramsay’s ideas when she says, “They would, she thought, going on again, however long they lived, come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to her too. It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven” (To the Lighthouse 158-159). Her belief that she will make herself remembered through the other characters’ returns, either physical or mental, to her house where she has achieved unity among them, again pre-empts Bachelard’s association between stability or permanence and the house, although again it shows Bachelard’s and Mrs Ramsay’s conservative representations and understandings of the domestic space. Quite similar to Mrs Ramsay, Mrs Dalloway makes it clear that her true mission is making people united against misery and chaos to alleviate their suffering, which will also give her the feeling of achieving something meaningful in her restricted life at home. On an occasion when she feels the anxiety of being criticized by her husband and Peter Walsh for her organization of parties at home, she rationalizes her parties by resembling her house to a “dungeon” which she should “decorate” to mitigate the sufferings of people. Her attempts to make her living space a better place, in this respect, is a telling example of Lefebvre’s notion of social space, which can be transformed for better with individual experiences:

89 As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. (71)

However, as can be observed in Mrs Dalloway’s anxiety about being criticized for her parties, most of the male characters of these novels express their dislike of these attempts by women to turn their houses into more social places, perhaps because it goes against the Ruskinian, and evidently male Victorian idea of home as a basically asocial place where women, as home keepers, should maintain an atmosphere of rest and comfort for the male family members, an idea which Bachelard points to in his analysis of the house as well. This feeling of discomfort can be clearly seen in Mr Bankes, Mr Tansley, and Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse during the scene when all the members of the Ramsay family and their guests come together for dinner. Here, Mr Bankes thinks,

. . . that if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would have been free to work. Yes, he thought, it is a terrible waste of time . . . How trifling it all is, how boring it all is, he thought, compared with the other thing – work . . . He wished only to be alone and take up that book. He felt uncomfortable; he felt treacherous, that he could sit by her side and feel nothing for her. (130)

Similarly, while Mr Tansley finds the occasion “silly” and “superficial,” preferring to have stayed in his room reading alone (126), Mr Ramsay gets angry observing the people around the table (he particularly gets angry at Mr Augustus asking for another plate of soup) as “he hated everything dragging on for hours like this” (138). In The Voyage Out, too, we find a male character disliking the incursions into the home of outside social life. Hewet, who mostly seems to acknowledge (sadly) and reject the separation of the spheres assigned to men and women, tells Rachel that his book is about a young married couple that travels happily for a while before they have a child. As he says, once the woman has a child and finds herself constrained in a conventional maternal and home-based life, her attempts to have a life of her own bring the outside world into their house, with effects that he dislikes:

90 Betty was an admirable mother; but it did not take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and strong, with healthy limbs and a body and brain that called urgently for exercise . . . . ’ (In short she began to give teaparties.) . . . ‘Coming in late from this singular talk with old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined room . . . with the sound of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky slung tragically across his mind . . . he found women’s hats dotted about among his papers. Women’s wraps and absurd little feminine shoes and umbrellas were in the hall . . . . Then the bills began to come in . . . (334)

As seen from these examples, acknowledging the dynamic nature of social space, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse try to subvert the essentialist notions attached to domestic and public space and their so-called suitable occupiers even through the dominantly conventionalist female characters who try to overcome their dissatisfaction by working on the space they occupy at home, by restructuring the social spaces of home, and they also demonstrate how such attempts by female characters are disapproved by men.

In addition to this subversion of the patriarchal idea that home is a feminine and basically an asocial place providing comfort to its members, To the Lighthouse also mocks the idealization of home as having stability and order as opposed to the potentially threatening chaos and fluidity and change outside. The conceptualization is in line with Lefebvre’s idea of the interconnectedness of different spaces and Tuan’s close association between time and space. For example, in the well-known dinner scene Mrs Ramsay is disappointed in her attempts to establish unity and harmony among her visitors, which she believes her domestic skills and home could achieve, for she becomes aware that there is also no genuine unity inside: “The room (she looked around it) was very shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. She bore a look at Mr Tansley. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men” (124). The narrative, following Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts, remarks that there only “seemed” to be order inside:

91 Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things waved and vanished, waterily. (139-140)

As seen in these remarks, the juxtaposition of the inside and outside regarding attributes such as order, unity and existence in opposition to fluidity and nonexistence is subverted with the narrator finding the “outside world” strange and pointing to the unreality of the inside world appearing to be more substantial with the word “seem.” Later, in the “Time Passes” section, it is stated that the whole house is swept by darkness and time, changing every object and characterizing the home, that had momentarily represented “order and dry land”, with instability and inescapable change:

Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” (179)

It is also in “Time Passes” that an association between time and space is made: “But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave” (181), which echoes Tuan’s ideas that there exists an intimate connection between time and space. It can be claimed that the narrative attributes the notions of flow, change and fluidity, that are generally attached to time, attached to space as well, assigning a dynamic nature to the notion of space. This section of the book, in many passages, implies that space “passes” as well as time, challenging the construction of space as a fixed entity even if the narrative later conveys the dinner scene as a fixed mental space for the characters who still remember the unity that night has granted them. Nevertheless, bringing a formerly neglected constituent of narrative, space (long-established as a fixed and

92 homogenous element), to the foreground as seen in these chapters, To the Lighthouse effectively reveals the new understanding of “positive negative space” that characterized the spirit of modernism.

The narrative of the next section of the novel strengthens this construction of space as a changeable entity by focusing on how characters feel about the house when they come back to it ten years later. When the remaining members of the family return, they cannot feel attached to it or to anyone at all, reminding us of Proust’s character Marcel finding everything changed in the town after years of absence. Lily’s perspective includes the observation that:

The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a step outside, a voice calling (“It’s not in the cupboard; it’s on the landing,” some one cried), was a question, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. Mrs Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too—repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her. (208)

Lily’s description of the Ramsay house as a strange, unfamiliar and undifferentiated place here (even if she previously enjoyed her time there during the previous visit when Mrs Ramsay and all the other family members were alive) brings to mind Tuan’s ideas regarding human beings’ changing perspectives towards places depending on how these places “accommodate” or “frustrate” their desires (65). Lily might have felt alienated and detached from this house, seeing that there are some missing components of her past moments of “friendship and liking” (228) even with Charles Tansley (whom she disliked due to his humiliating sayings for women) in the present state of the house: Mrs Ramsay in particular:

That woman sitting there writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite (she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful) something—this scene on the beach for example, this moment of friendship and liking—which survived, after all these years complete, so that she dipped

93 into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art. (228)

It is particularly in the last part of the novel (“The Lighthouse”) that the narrative highlights the idea that things, people and spaces are plural, relative and alterable depending on perspectives, time and distance. This can best be observed when James, adopting a perspectivist attitude, celebrates the plural nature of the lighthouse after he compares the image of it that he held ten years earlier with the one he sees at present, “The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now – James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight . . . So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse” (263). Another example can be seen when Cam talks about how distance from home changes her perception of it and how she feels like a stranger to home when she is far away from it on the sea: “She could no longer make out, there on the hillside, which was their house. All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refine, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part. Which was their house?” (235) The fact that Cam finds the house different and foreign to her from a little distance (which can be explained with Poincaré’s explanation that objects in visual space appeared to change in size when moved to different distances in relation to the viewer) reflects the changes that happened in the understanding of space and emergence of new spaces such as geometrical space, visual space, tactile space or motor spaces in modernism.

Woolf not only rejects the idea of fixity attached to the understanding of space but also to individuals. It can be asserted that Woolf’s portrayal of individuals and social space opposes Bachelard’s construction of the childhood house as a place which “has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting”, which makes us “the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house” and which makes all the other houses we later inhabit “variations on a fundamental theme”

94 (Bachelard 15). The best examples of such a challenge can be seen in The Years in which particularly the female members of the Pargiter family end up in new forms of living which sharply contrast with the limited and conventional domestic space of the childhoods at Abercorn Terrace. For example, after her father’s death, Eleanor eventually sells the house at Abercorn Terrace and opts to travel rather than to take another house, acknowledging the presence and necessity of change and refusing to reproduce the Victorian domestic conventions that overwhelmed her at home in Abercorn Terrace: “Sir William was getting into bed next door, his life was over; hers was beginning. No, I don’t mean to take another house, not another house, she thought, looking at the stain on the ceiling. Again the sense came to her of a ship padding softly through the waves; of a train swinging from side to side a railway line. Things can’t go on forever, she thought. Things pass, things change” (148). Perhaps similar to her choice not to take another house, she does not get married as well, which can be an implication of not being tied to a particular house or husband: “‘Marriage isn’t for everyone,’ Eleanor interrupted” (256). In the “Present Day” section of the novel she is found in her flat entertaining guests, having achieved her dream of travelling and being described as being “very vigorous . . . tanned with the sun” after her trip to India (211).

All in all, The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years, underscore the fact that the physical and mental separation of private or domestic space and public space served as the basis of sustaining the dominant patriarchal order of the English society. Investigations carried out in these novels regarding their representations of domestic space reveal patriarchally-encouraged ideological characteristics attached to it such as femininity, comfort, order, stability and fixity, which is in line with the physical and mental construction of domestic space by patriarchy. They convey how domestic space is constructed and maintained by the ideals of patriarchy mainly through revealing characters’ patriarchal ideas, behaviour and attitudes with a focus on space, and through scenes in which male and female characters occupy different space even in the same place and become involved in different activities that are deemed proper for them by society. However, anticipating

95 Lefebvre and Tuan, and acknowledging that the discourse of domestic space is merely a social and cultural construction imposed by the dominant social order, they also disrupt such associations attached to domestic sphere, and render domestic space as consisting not only of physical and mental space but also of social space, subverting its patriarchal construction and rendering it heterogeneous, dynamic and open to change. In this respect, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years challenge the association of domestic space with femininity and comfort for its so- called proper occupiers (women) and its other residents by uncovering the female characters’ feelings of confinement and discomfort at home, portraying domestic space as inseparable from social and economic concerns of public space (which echoes Lefebvre’s ideas regarding the interconnectedness of spaces, and unsettles the sharp distinctions drawn between private and public space), revealing male characters’ (even though only a few male characters’) negative feelings of discomfort at home, and by presenting two predominantly conventionalist female characters, Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay, as trying to overcome their unsatisfactory lives at home by working on the space they occupy at home (by restructuring the social spaces of home), and by showing how such attempts of female characters are disapproved by men. The Years and (particularly) To the Lighthouse also engage in undermining the other patriarchal constructions and attributions assigned to domestic space such as being stable and ordered. They strikingly render the social space of home as dynamic and open to change by demonstrating that domestic space is vulnerable to the flow and fluidity of time, inescapable social and cultural change, and its meanings are various and multiple depending on individuals’ perspectives that may vary in line with a number of factors such as time and distance. As can be concluded from these findings, these novels strikingly express their criticism of patriarchy through their representations of domestic space (in which they both expose and challenge certain characteristics attached to domestic space by patriarchy), and underline an understanding of space which refuses fixity, stability, rigidity and homogeneity.

96 3.2. Creators of Space: Erasing the Invisibility of the Working-class

As claimed earlier, domestic space in Woolf’s works is a dynamic and heterogeneous social space that characters perceive and experience differently in terms of their gender, class and nationality. She frequently exposes and dethrones the characteristics attributed to domestic space by the dominant ideologies of her society. In this regard, as seen in the previous section of this chapter, Woolf’s fiction disrupts one such construction of domestic space, which is its understanding as a space of femininity, maternity, order, harmony, and changelessness. However, Woolf not only treats domestic space with regard to gender issues but also in relation to class politics. Her works frequently feature peopled rooms such as dining rooms and drawing rooms as social and historical sites produced by the labour of domestic workers. Even though she persistently uncovers unequal power relations between different genders and classes in domestic space, she does not demonstrate this inequality as a pure determinant of human life; her novels to some extent destabilize the seemingly rigid structure of class and gender divisions and imagine the possibility of reshaping them by bringing to light the obscured practices and spatial codes of the marginalized (foregrounding a formerly negative space – domestic sphere of fixed and homogeneous relations) and by showing the changes her society was going through in terms of its domestic living spaces. In this respect, this part of the dissertation analyses Woolf’s novels’ representations of domestic space with regard to the issues of class by investigating the extent to which they employ a Lefebvrian understanding of space (considering knowledge and language as space as well) as socially constructed, and as heterogeneous and ever-transforming, and to which they portray space and place in their relation to individuals as suggested by Tuan. It also refers to a Foucauldian characteristic of these novels – the notion of heterotopia – regarding their portrayal of space as dynamic, and thus allowing for liberation.

97 3.2.1 Unsettling Fetishization of Domestic Space in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse

As mentioned in the previous sections, Woolf considered her childhood home as a place in which she felt unprivileged and estranged due to the privilege given to its male members. In her memoirs, the alternating dwelling places of her childhood, 22 Hyde Park Gate in London and Talland House in Cornwall, appear as places imbued with composite networks of gender and class relations, the house in London is “a complete model of Victorian society,” as she termed it (Woolf, Moments of Being 147). It was a place of domination and confinement in which she had to stay while her brothers left for school and then university and in which her life was mainly dominated and controlled by her brother George and her father Leslie (Lee 34). While these houses were microcosms of the patriarchal social system, they also reflected the class-stratified nature of the society which entailed a number of differences between different classes. It is in these houses that Woolf’s mother governed and thus dominated the servants, making even the very young Woolf intimate with some of the class distinctions and privileges her class yielded. As Lee remarks, in “A Sketch of the Past” Woolf’s descriptions of 22 Hyde Park Gate point to the class distinctions ingrained in the middle or upper class psyche, which could also be clearly seen in the architecture of the house (Lee 6-7). Drawing attention to the vertical structure of her childhood house, Woolf visualizes the servants’ dark sitting room in the basement, the Victorian double drawing room and the tea table in its center in the ground floor, above the drawing room the bedrooms, the nurseries on the third floor and her father’s study room with three long windows at the top of the house which gives him privacy and independence (Woolf, Moments of Being 116-119).

Rather than normalizing these divisions that are reflected even in the structure of the house, Woolf critically exposes the tensions and conflicts these divisions create between classes. For example, she remembers and writes about an incident that occurred due to the inferior living conditions of the servants. One of their servants

98 complains about the basement they occupy to her mother, claiming that it is like living in hell. Acknowledging the fact that the basement was really a dark and filthy place for seven people, Woolf critically portrays her mother’s harsh attitude to the servant by drawing attention to her mother’s cold posture of a Victorian matron: “My mother . . . said (perhaps): ‘Leave the room’; and she (unfortunate girl) vanished behind the red plush curtain which, hooped round a semi-circular wire, and anchored by a great gold knob, hid the door that led from the dining room to the pantry” (116– 17). Critics such as Son particularly consider the seemingly small detail of a curtain hiding the pantry to be quite significant in that it reveals Woolf’s awareness of the upper or middle class instinct to maintain the idea of domestic space as something given, not as something produced by the labour of lower classes (Son 61). Another such example concerns the shame Woolf thinks her mother displayed when a visitor unexpectedly came across the servants’ shabby bedrooms: “My mother . . . seemed a little ‘provoked,’ a little perhaps ashamed, that he had seen what must have been their rather shabby rooms. My father’s great study . . . was a fine big room, very high, three windowed, and entirely book lined. His old rocking chair covered in American cloth was the center of the room which was the brain of the house” (119). As seen in her sudden turn of the topic to her father’s room, literally juxtaposing the rooms in her prose, Woolf, acknowledging the interconnectedness of different spaces, is quite conscious of the disparities drawn between the spaces that different classes occupy at home and frequently points to them in her works. In another example, Lee talks about how Woolf quite frequently looks back on the household life of her Victorian and Edwardian childhood or on other houses she chanced upon as they must have been experienced by the servants. Lee cites Woolf’s description of the Carlyles’ house as a genuine expression of Woolf’s feelings about the labour- intensiveness of Victorian domestic life:

The high old house without water, without electric light, without gas fires, full of books and coal smoke and four-poster beds and mahogany cupboards, where two of the most nervous and exacting people of their time lived, year in year out, was served by one unfortunate maid. All through the mid- Victorian age the house was necessarily a battlefield where daily, summer

99 and winter, mistress and maid fought against dirt and cold for cleanliness and warmth . . . the scene of labour, effort and perpetual struggle. [n.75: Woolf, The London Scene, 24-25]12 (Lee 40)

Woolf’s description of the Carlyles’ house also reveals that everyone who was not a member of the labouring classes, even impoverished middle-class people, had at least one servant at home during what Nash named “the great age of servants”, which lasted from the eighteenth century in England to the Edwardian Period (130). Nash claims that the real function of servants was to signify the class status of their masters, notwithstanding the harsh conditions at home: “Without servants, it was impossible for a family to make any claims of gentility. With at least one servant, however humble, a family could maintain the appearance of gentility no matter how desperate their financial situation had become” (130).

Apart from these examples from her non-fiction, in which Woolf expresses her awareness of the exploitation and negligence of the labour of the working class and the unsanitary and inhuman conditions they often faced, Lee also points to Woolf’s personal dislike of “being in a position of authority over anyone”, which, as she reported, led to quarrels with Leonard over how to treat the servants, and a horror of her servant Nelly’s jealousy, hatred, excessive talk and dependency on them (Lee 91). This difficulty of how to treat servants can be observed in The Years in which Martin, talking to their family servant Crosby, finds it difficult to continue a conversation and thinks, “He could not think what to say next. He hated talking to servants; it always made him feel insincere. Either one simpers, or one’s hearty, he was thinking. In either case it’s a lie” (154).

Lee also shows how Woolf found the system of having servants work at home quite degrading for both sides, using this passage from Woolf’s diary to illustrate her argument (Lee 355): “My opinion never changes that our domestic system is wrong . . . the system of keeping two young women chained in a kitchen to laze & work &

12 The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia Woolf, Random House, 1975.

100 suck their life from two in the drawing room” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf 314). Citing Woolf’s words, Lee regards Woolf’s expression of her feelings about having uneducated servants at home as “chillingly class-bound” (Lee 91):

It is an absurdity, how much time L. & I have wasted in talking about servants. And it can never be done with because the fault lies in the system. How can an uneducated woman let herself in, alone, into our lives? What happens is that she becomes a mongrel; & has no roots anywhere. I could put my theory into practice by getting a daily of a civilized kind, who had her baby in Kentish town; & treated me as an employer, not friend. Here is a fine rubbish heap left by our parents to be swept. (The Diary of Virginia Woolf 220)

Woolf’s novels’ treatment of domestic space in relation to gender and class politics has produced a number of opinions from critics. Lee (91) has openly stated that the hostile attitude towards servants found in Woolf’s memoirs and diaries is also on show in her fiction, but her biography of the writer does not pursue this into discussions of the literature. Among literary critics, some find Woolf’s dealing with the class issue in relation to her feminist agenda problematic as they think such a treatment obliterates the class issue by absorbing it in the gender issue. Lynch, who is of this frame of mind, argues for a clear cut distinction between the fight against the patriarchy and the rigid class system of the society, believing that combining the fight for both of these causes means ignoring the power imbalance between women from different class backgrounds (Lynch 70). In The Labors of Modernism: Domesticity, Servants and Authorship in Modernist Fiction (2013) Wilson also points to a lack of genuine interest in the class issue in Woolf’s fiction. She starts her discussion by claiming that although critics have carefully examined modernism in relation to gender, racial, ethnic and imperial issues, there has been a lack of interest in the close link between narrative structure and servants in modernist fiction (1), which might be related to the decline of domestic servitude “in Great Britain and the United States from its Victorian heights, and . . . the advent of widely available domestic technology that replaces the servants who used to keep the middle-class home” (2). Wilson looks into fictional works written by modernist women writers including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen and Jean Rhys, and contends

101 that none of them can go beyond the Western tradition that “objectifies servants, making them into synechdocal representations of ‘the people’ rather than fully drawn characters in their own rights” (8). She maintains that the ways servants are depicted in the works of these modernist female writers demonstrate how modernist fiction can be seen as a reaction to, but also as an uncomfortable negotiation with, these servants’ necessary presences in the houses of female protagonists, within the lives of the writers who created these protagonists and in the house of fiction, too (3). Focusing her attention on Woolf, Wilson says,

It is highly significant that Woolf is writing when the Angel in the House appears and must be killed: Woolf seeks quite openly to substitute authorship for household authority. Yet still, despite some often-explicit rejections of (Victorian) domestic ideals (seen particularly in Woolf’s writings), domesticity continues to operate as a shaping force in the lives and work of these writers, and they still turn to the domestic servants whose role has been to maintain that field of authorization. (4-5)

What Wilson emphasizes here is that even though servants were key figures in creating the modernist fiction of these women writers, within the novels these servants were not allowed to have modernist selves at all. Alison Light in Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007) makes a similar kind of comment by investigating the biography of Woolf and some of the women she and her family employed. She asserts that Woolf’s understanding of the restricting Victorian domestic life she desired to escape and the new modernist domesticity she and her friends in Bloomsbury wanted to achieve were closely tied with the labour of domestic servants:

Those who lived in Bloomsbury felt hampered and irritated by servants, but they could not imagine a life without that division of labour which made housekeeping a female activity, and housework performed, where possible, by women of the lower classes. (115)

In The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction From Below (1986) Bruce Robbins also points to the same ignorant attitude towards class issue in English literature by extending the focus to the eighteenth and nineteenth century English literature. He claims that depictions of servants (their frequent representations as peeping through

102 keyholes, reading their masters’ letters, gossiping, having affairs, corrupting children or worshipping their masters) in the literary works of those times rarely expose with accuracy the grim realities of life of those servants (xi). He makes a brief summary of the roles of servants in literature from Sophocles to Virginia Woolf, where they appear only as “mere appendages of their masters . . . It is as expository prologues, oracular messengers, and authorial mouthpieces, rhetorical ‘doublings’ of the protagonist, accessories used to accomplish or resolve the action, that servants fill the margins of texts devoted to their superiors” (x).

As scholars such as Son argue, these arguments against Woolf’s treatment of the class issue fail to see how Woolf makes use of different strategies, sometimes combining and sometimes separating the issues of gender and class in her works, which means that she changes her treatment of these issues depending on contexts and situations (Son 62). Son asserts that Woolf’s fusion of the gender and class issues might have resulted from the understanding that it could be more effective to fight against the patriarchal rule at home through finding connections rather than discrepancies between middle and lower class women, through focusing on their shared destinies as obscured and marginalized producers of the domestic sphere (62- 63). These women are united in their ceaseless labour and their equally unrelenting oppression by the patriarchal forces. However, Woolf also differentiates between them regarding their unequal social standings and relations, showing the exploitation of the labour of working class women and the domination of the middle class women over them (most clearly, perhaps, in The Years) − although not as frequently as she portrays the disparities between different genders and their assigned spaces in her novels.

Woolf’s fiction demonstrates a keen interest in exploring the domestic sphere of home not only in terms of gender relations and issues but also with regard to the class relations within the household. In this respect, it can be claimed that her novels underscore the constructed nature of physical, mental and social space of home that is mainly shaped by dominant ideologies such as the patriarchal social system and

103 the class-stratified social code. Her concern with problems arising from the rigid class distinctions of her society reveals itself in her descriptions of the rooms given to the working class members of the households she portrays in her novels. In The Years, Crosby’s living conditions at home in Abercorn Terrace are conveyed by Eleanor who admits being ashamed of them: “‘I should think you’d be glad to be out of that basement anyhow, Crosby,’ said Eleanor . . . She had never realized how dark, how low it was, until, looking at it with ‘our Mr Grice’, she had felt ashamed” (150). It is obvious that Eleanor becomes aware of shabbiness of the room Crosby occupied only when they are selling the house. The estate agent, Mr Grice makes her look at rooms with respect to their selling points; this could serve as a striking example of the indifferent attitude of upper class characters toward the working class characters and their living conditions at home. In The Voyage Out, a similar but more ignorant attitude is displayed by Rachel in her response to the housekeeper Mrs Chailey, rendered through a scene that passes between her and Rachel during the sea voyage. Discontented with the inadequacy of sheets on the ship and the room given to her, Mrs Chailey complains to Rachel, in a bout of anger, that “you couldn’t ask a living creature to sit where I sit” (23). Regarding Mrs Chailey’s behaviour as childish, Rachel reprimands her by accusing her of telling lies and dismissing her complaints: “‘Lies! Lies! Lies! exclaimed the mistress indignantly . . . In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she had not leave to sit, she did not think of the particular case, and, unpacking her music, soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets” (24). Following this scene, Mrs Chailey is shown yearning for her home: “The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was not a home . . . she would cry this evening; she would cry to-morrow. It was not home” (24). Her vulnerability when exposed to the openness of the vast and unknown space of the sea brings to mind Bachelard’s metaphor of the houseless human being a “dispersed being” (Bachelard 7), which is similar to how Eleanor in The Years feels when her father dies and she sells their house, but cannot decide on whether to travel or “take another house” (148) and also how Cam in To the Lighthouse feels when the long-distance view of their house

104 renders the house and the shore indistinguishable and strange to her as if she had never been a part of them (235). This serves as a telling example of how Woolf’s novels acknowledge the importance of space and place, and their constitutive character in individual’s lives. This incidence between Rachel and Mrs Chailey is also of great importance in other ways. The first one concerns the fact that even though these characters are far away from England, which separation they initially believe will give them freedom from all the social restraints at home, they reproduce the same social system on the ship, as seen in the stereotypical mistress-servant relationship between Rachel and Mrs Chailey and the different spheres they occupy in the same physical place. The fact that life on board demonstrates continued relations of power characteristic of life back on England brings us to Tuan’s idea that an unknown space, in this case the ship, turns into a place when individuals attach meanings to it, in most of the cases the meanings that are imposed by the dominant ideologies of their society (Tuan 34). On the other hand, the second important implication that could be drawn from this scene is related to another claim of Tuan regarding how people are inclined to perceive an open and undifferentiated space and an enclosed and humanized place differently at different times. Tuan asserts that space is a widespread symbol of freedom in the Western society while place is a “calm center of established values” (54). Human beings require both of them and human lives are, in fact, a movement between what space and place embody: freedom and venture in the case of space; attachment and shelter in the case of place. He also adds that while in open space people may intensely crave for a sense of place, in the solitude of place they may desire to venture into the vastness of space. In this respect, Mrs Chailey’s desire for home, the center of her established values and relations, in opposition to the open, unknown space of the sea, and characters’ construction of places, codes of behaviour and relations on the ship -- on the vast space of the sea -- in line with their social system left behind can also be explained with these ideas of Tuan, once more showing the critical role space and place play in individuals’ lives.

105 In addition to the portrayal of class relations through the descriptions of the places domestic servants occupy in the house, anticipating Lefebvre’s ideas that language and knowledge also serve as spaces of ideologies, Woolf’s novels also touch upon how these servants are perceived and treated by their employers. Her explorations of these interactions usually yield a view of the employers perceiving the servants as inferior beings without individuality, and of servants being ordered to do things for which they are not appreciated at all. For instance, in To the Lighthouse, even though the names of the servants in the Ramsays’ holiday house are frequently woven into the narrative by characters calling them or speaking to them, there is no individuality attached to them; they are only addressed in order to be asked to keep food hot, serve the guests, accompany children to the nursery, or put things in their places. Even Lily, who differs from other female characters in her efforts to create a better and freer life, seems to have accepted and to maintain the class-stratified order of her society when she miserably says that her painting will be relegated to servants’ rooms: “It would be hung in the servants’ bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then?” (225) In another example, Eleanor in The Years reduces numberless servants’ bodies to a vision of a single, disembodied arm: walking home through Abercorn Terrace she notes that “The houses, with their pillars and their front gardens, all looked highly respectable; in every front room she seemed to see a parlourmaid’s arm sweep over the table, laying it for luncheon” (72).

Woolf’s novels sometimes convey the unappreciated and overwhelming amount of work domestic servants are engaged with together with the ladies guiding them, and on several occasions they point to these servants’ double exploitation by portraying the invisibility they have among middle and upper class people. Mrs Dalloway serves as a good example of how Woolf unsettles the fetishization of domestic space. Lefebvre claims that this fetishization is enforced by the ruling class of the society in order to maintain the status quo by obscuring “productive labour” and social relations that have generated space, making its members believe space to be a neutral background and to take the dominant social order for granted. In this novel, there is a juxtaposition of two scenes portraying domestic servants and their work. These are

106 the well-known party scenes in the novel, and they effectively reveal Woolf’s exposure of class ideologies surrounding domestic space. Both Lady Bruton’s party and Clarissa’s party draw attention to working class labour while critically demonstrating the middle class attitude that is indifferent to the existence of the working class as a producer of space. Lady Bruton’s party opens with an interesting depiction of the luncheon table:

“But let us eat first,” she (Lady Bruton) said. And so there began a soundless and exquisite passing to and fro through swing doors of aproned white- capped maids, handmaidens not of necessity, but adepts in a mystery or grand deception practiced by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of the hand, the traffic ceases, and there rises instead this profound illusion in the first place about the food—how it is not paid for; and then that the table spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver, little mats, saucers of red fruit; films of brown cream mask turbot; in casseroles severed chickens swim; coloured, undomestic, the fire burns; and with the wine and the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund visions before musing eyes . . . (97-98)

In this scene, the table seems to be a heterogeneous social place of both labour and leisure, critically showing how servants are treated like mere automatons ordered around by “a wave of the hand” in the place they are actually producing. The description of the table as the one which “spreads itself voluntarily with glass and silver” also points to the upper class view of the luncheon table as something mysteriously given, disregarding the labour of the working class. Opposed to such a portrayal of a luncheon table, Clarissa’s party scene exposes the servants’ movements, perspectives, and names -- Lucy, Mrs Walker, Jenny, Mrs Parkinson, and Mrs Barnet -- into the narrative, making them exist as organizers and producers:

Lucy came running full tilt downstairs, having just nipped in to the drawing- room to smooth a cover, to straighten a chair, to pause a moment and feel whoever came in must think how clean, how bright . . . she appraised each; heard a roar of voices; people already coming up from dinner; she must fly! The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said . . . Did it matter, did it matter in the least, one Prime Minister more or less? It made no difference at this hour of the night to Mrs Walker among the plates, saucepans . . . All she felt was, one Prime Minister more or less made not a scrap of difference to Mrs Walker . . . But it was the salmon that bothered Mrs Walker . . . (154)

107 This passage is quite significant in that it conveys the working-class viewpoint with some reference to their perception of the upper class, and shows both the individuality and efforts of working people. As Zwerdling claims, the fact that the Prime Minister’s identity is devalued by a servant’s point of view in these lines reverses the class-based power which dismisses and obscures working class identity and labour in the domestic sphere (Zwerdling 96). In another, but bitter, devaluation of the power hierarchy, Miss Kilman, tutor to Clarissa’s daughter, criticizes Clarissa for being idle and doing nothing but resting at home as if overwhelmed by work, through spatializing her claims: “Instead of lying on the sofa – “‘My mother is resting,’” Elizabeth had said – she should have been in a factory; behind a counter; Mrs Dalloway and all the other fine ladies!” (116).

Similarly, To the Lighthouse consists of scenes in which treatments of servants by the characters and the narrative convey the middle or upper class psyche as dismissing the existence of the working class and their labour. The dinner organized by Mrs Ramsay to unite the guests of their summer house clearly exposes the middle or upper class attitude of obscuring the labour of the working class people in the production of space. During the dinner the Boeuf en Daube made by the cook receives much praise from the guests, all of which is directed to Mrs Ramsay as the lady of the house: “‘It is a triumph,’” said Mr Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked. How did she manage these things in the depths of the country? he asked her. She was a wonderful woman” (143). Receiving the praise joyously, thinking that she could unite her guests and this would make them always remember her, she attributes all the success to her grandmother’s recipe: “‘It is a French recipe of my grandmother’s,’ said Mrs Ramsay, speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abomination” (143). The narrative nevertheless grants a small space of its own to celebrating the effort that the cook put into making the well-liked dish, and goes on to give Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts which reflect how another domestic worker, Marthe, plays a great role in producing the pleasant atmosphere enjoyed by the family and their guests, through

108 her serving of the meat: “The cook had spent three days over that dish. And she must take great care, Mrs Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specifically tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine” (143).

Later, in the “Time Passes” section, the narrative gives more space to the portrayal of how it is through the domestic workers’ labour that the Ramsay household is once more turned into a space of and for the living. Readers are told that no one has visited or cared about the summer house for ten years, and time has damaged the house. It is striking that the narrative assigns two chapters (chapter 8 and 9) in this section to conveying the hard work of Mrs McNab, her son and Mrs Bast in trying to save the house from the destruction of time and in re-establishing it as a liveable place: “Slowly and painfully, with broom and pail, mopping, scouring, Mrs McNab, Mrs Bast, stayed the corruption and the rot; rescued from the pool of Time that was fast closing over them now a basin, now a cupboard; fetched up from oblivion all the Waverly novels and a tea-set one morning; in the afternoon restored to sun and air a brass fender and a set of steel fire-irons” (199). It is also interesting that these servants are brought into the foreground only in the absence of the household owners, which strikingly points to the class-based ways of spatialization in domestic space. However, it is also important to mention that this section was meant to be about time and have no plot, subjects or character as Woolf tells in her diary: “here is the most difficult abstract piece of writing – I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to . . .” (A Writer’s Diary 100). Considering what Woolf says regarding this section of the novel, it can be claimed that these working-class characters and their hard work are not the main focus of this part as they are merely images relating to the passage of time, not in their own actions.

The close investigation pursued in this part of the dissertation into Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years, has revealed that these novels not

109 only treat domestic space with regard to the gender issues but also in relation to the class politics. They persistently divulge unequal power relations between different genders and classes in domestic space even though they do not handle the class issue as frequently as they portray the disparities between different genders and their assigned spaces. Their concern with problems arising from the rigid class distinctions of society can be most apparently observed in their descriptions of the rooms given to the working class members of the households, which strikingly reveals the indifferent attitude of upper class characters toward the working class characters and their living conditions at home. Besides the portrayal of class relations through the descriptions of the places domestic servants occupy in the house, echoing Lefebvre’s ideas that language and knowledge also serve as spaces of ideologies, these novels also touch upon how these servants are perceived and treated by their employers. Investigations into these interactions usually produce a view of the employers perceiving the servants as inferior beings without individuality, and of servants being ordered to do things for which they are not appreciated at all, which points to the middle or upper class psyche as dismissing the existence of the working class and their labour, and as disregarding the significant role the working class has in producing the space of home. However, they do not demonstrate this inequality between different classes in domestic space and mistreatments of the lower classes as fixed and pure constitutes of human life. In this respect, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, to some extent destabilize the seemingly rigid structure of class relations at home by bringing to light, appreciating and celebrating the obscured practices of the lower class members in domestic sphere (through the narrative’s or some characters’ viewpoints), by critically exposing the tensions and conflicts these divisions create between classes, and by conveying the working-class viewpoint with some reference to their perception of the upper class, which shows their existence as individuals of society, and which even reverses the class-based power that dismisses and obscures their identity and labour in the domestic sphere (even if such representations do not cover as much space as representations of domestic space regarding gender relations). In these ways, these two novels undermine the

110 construction and perception of the domestic sphere as a physical and mental space of fixity and homogeneity, and highlight its being a social space as well, which yields differing meanings to its different occupants; and which is therefore, changeable.

3.2.2 Changing Domestic Living Spaces in The Years

In The Years exploration of the domestic sphere in relation to class politics is carried out mainly through Crosby and the domestic workers of Pargiters’ household, whose condition is sharply contrasted with that of the servants in Digby and Eugénie Pargiter’s house. Starting from very early in the novel, the narrative frequently draws attention to the hard work that Crosby keenly engages in within Abercorn Terrace, and these frequent mentions of the maid who later becomes their housekeeper implies the significant role that she plays in the construction of daily sphere of the house and family life, perhaps a more significant one than that of any Pargiter family member: “She had known every cupboard, flagstone, chair and table in that large rambling house, not from five or six feet of distance as they had known it; but from her knees, as she scrubbed and polished; she had known every groove, stain, fork, knife, napkin and cupboard” (150). The minute accounts of Crosby’s movements in the house also point to the fact that Abercorn Terrace is a house where order, culturally imposed roles, boredom, monotony and silence reign:

Crosby had come in. She was carrying a tray. One by one with an exasperating little chink she put the cups, the plates, the knives, the jam-pots, the dishes of cake and the dishes of bread and butter on the tray. Then, balancing it carefully in front of her, she went out. There was a pause. In she came again and folded the tablecloth and moved the tables. Again there was a pause. A moment or two later back she came carrying two silk-shaded lamps. She set one in the front room, one in the back room. Then, she went, creaking in her cheap shoes, to the window and drew the curtains. (18)

Colonel Abel Pargiter appears to be the embodiment of patriarchal and class- stratified nature of the family house in Abercorn Terrace where he does not tolerate untidiness, noise and transgression of domestic roles. It is seen that there is little communication between the family members in the house and its domestic workers, for this can be observed in Crosby’s usual behaviour of only grinning back to what

111 is told to her: “Crosby grinned. They always spoke to her in the third person, because she never answered but only grinned” (154). Her attitude and behaviour with the family members indicate that she has submissively internalized the rules and norms of her society and obediently acts in line with them. When the Pargiter house is sold, she moves to a room on the top floor of a block of flats and, rather than enjoying her move from the dark basement of her previous house, she misses it. She does not like her new living place as it is located in Richmond Street which “was very low compared with Abercorn Terrace” (154), which shows the ambiguous and disturbing situation of the servant who has both internalized and suffers from her employers’ class attitudes, so that she is unable to reconcile herself to her own class position – at least when it comes to living space.

The narrative contrasts the Pargiter house with another family house, that of Digby (the Colonel’s brother) and his wife Eugénie, which is characterized by openness, liveliness and naturalness in opposition to the tidy, quiet and rule-bound rooms in Abercorn Terrace. Colonel Pargiter, who values order and neatness at home, considers Digby’s house untidy and noisy: “Here the door opened and as he went upstairs he thought he heard, from somewhere in the background, a shout of laughter . . . It was very untidy. There was a litter of shavings from something that was unpacked on the floor” (83). This untidy drawing room where the windows and the piano remain open is also later touched upon by Martin (one of the Colonel’s sons) who “liked going there”: “He saw the untidy room; the piano open, the window open; a wind blowing the curtains, and his aunt coming forward with her arms open” (107). The open and heart-warming nature of this house is also suggested with regard to the treatment of domestic servants. The narrative implies the generosity of their mistress through a scene, just before Colonel Abel’s visit, in which an Italian housemaid is shown to be dancing and talking to another Italian servant (who enjoys reading a newspaper) about a hat Eugénie gave her “to atone for the mess in the drawing- room” (83). Following this, the narrative remarks that Colonel does not like being served by these “Italian dagoes” (83), pointing to the differences between the brothers’ households and their treatment of servants. This scene suggests that both

112 the employing and the employed classes can have very different attitudes and relationships within the household.

The Years also attempts to subvert the construction and perception of the domestic sphere as a place of fixity, homogeneity, and order, arranged to accommodate people from various classes in differing places and conditions by demonstrating the changes that were happening in the domestic living spaces of the British society, which suggests the dynamic nature of social space. This acts quite like a Lefebvrian understanding of space as ever-changing and transforming as the history unfolds. However, it can also be considered in line with Foucault’s similar idea of heterotopias as spaces that allow for new ways of living or occupying space such as the places which last for very long times but whose function changes throughout history, an example of which is cemeteries. The following analysis will reveal how the novel conveys the domestic space with its women and working-class members as a kind of heterotopia by demonstrating the changes it went through. In this respect, before delving into a close analysis, it is important to talk about the close association made between home and nation in terms of their perceived and constructed characteristics such as enclosure, protection and safety.

As scholars such as Marcus have noted, there was a dominance of single-family houses in England during the period 1840 to 1880, which strongly implies the contemporary British ideology of domestic space (83-84). The single-family house in a respected district was commonly perceived as the ideal place for living. The home was an enclosed and private physical space in a respected district, which echoes the gender politics of the time as well as the middle or upper class impulse to sustain physical distance from the lower classes who were living in different areas of the town or in village. As Marcus remarks, this concept of a family house was also a strong symbol of national identity, differentiating England from other countries (84). Marcus refers to the leading architectural magazines of that time which frequently drew attention to the risks of standardization and social mingling they observed in the foreign (French) notion of the apartment as a living space (84).

113 British society at that time argued for the superiority of English residences that maintained the divisions between the genders and classes at home as well as the desired distance between the physical spaces of the middle and upper classes, and the lower orders who were associated with disease, filth and moral or sexual looseness (84). Woolf, in her fiction, might be portraying this middle or upper class concern with maintaining a distance from the rest of society, showing it particularly through the frequent image of “thin partitions” that create feelings of insecurity and disturbance for upper class people. For example, in The Voyage Out, Clarissa Dalloway, who is portrayed as an overly class-conscious lady, feels insecure and afraid when thinking about the small distance between the rooms on the ship. The narrative in this part of the novel seems to firstly report thoughts of Clarissa indirectly until the part regarding the dreams and their being not confined to her and then give way to Clarissa’s mind again starting from the part regarding thin partitions:

Then, thinking of the black sea outside tossing beneath the moon, she shuddered, and thought of her husband and the others as companions on the voyage. The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each other’s faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say. (51)

The same concern is repeated again by the narrator when the rooms of the hotel in Santa Marina are described from the viewpoint of the British visitors: “There was not as thick a partition between the rooms as one might wish” (107).

In addition to the single family house, cultural motifs such as the country house and island also illustrated the preoccupation with the ideas of enclosure and privacy attached to the notions of home and nation. As Williams states, the period from about 1880 witnessed “the idea of England as ‘home,’” which could be seen in the English country house as the major metonym of the nation (281). These metonyms evoke a sense of a (literally) isolated and exclusive country and a ruling class which excluded

114 and othered the so-called less privileged classes and could also exclude subgroups such as women and foreign visitors or immigrants. However, as Son claims, with the increasing amount of social and geographical mobility and a number of changes triggered particularly by the developments in technology continuing through the Edwardian period and into the twentieth century, these ideals of home and nation became less sustainable (127). Particularly in The Years, Woolf portrays this gradual change as it affected domestic spaces, showing the move from single family houses in respectable districts to flats or rented rooms in less respectable areas due to the worsening financial situations, together with the various reactions her different characters show. These changes are shown to serve as a challenge to the exclusive space of home and nation that refuses to live closer to the marginalized, and at the same time it points to the constructed, and therefore dynamic, nature of social space as well.

The Years tells the story of three generations of a middle-class family called the Pargiters who adopt different ways of living from 1880 to what the novel names the “Present Day,” which is 1937. Although some critics have analysed it with a particular focus on Woolf’s feminist concern with a family system that repressed women, others put their emphasis on the issue of time, as suggested by its title. Some other critics such as Son draw attention to the fact that one of the titles Woolf intended for the novel was “Other People’s Houses” as Woolf recorded in her diary (Son 114). This intended title is quite telling in that it shows that Woolf was interested in issues of space as much as in those of time, and her concerns involved not only women’s lives but the lives of all other people in her novels. In this respect, the novel investigates and exposes the changing understanding of identity, home and society from 1880 to 1937, particularly through the portrayal of different living spaces within each time period depicted, which is noticeable with the increasing dominance of flats or rented rooms as new versions of home over single family houses.

115 As previously mentioned, the novel commences with a detailed scene of the Pargiter household in Abercorn Terrace in 1880, in which two daughters of the family, Milly and Delia, seem to be bored, engaging in their daily monotonous routine of boiling the tea kettle at their single-family home while the two other daughters, Rose, being the youngest, play around and Eleanor, the eldest, is out on her “grove day” – a day of the week in which she is involved in charitable work. By 1891, however, the Pargiter daughters are shown to have just started leaving this house to pursue their own lives and interests as seen in Delia’s choice of moving to an immigrant neighbourhood of London. The narrative renders Eleanor’s thoughts on her way to the district of London where Delia lives, which shows the changing urban settlement around, where single-family houses have been converted to multiple-occupancy buildings: “The houses were let out in offices, to societies, to people whose names were pinned up on the door-posts. The whole neighbourhood seemed to her foreign and sinister . . . Rooms were let out to single gentlemen only. There were cards in them which said ‘Furnished Apartments’ or ‘Bed and Breakfast’. She guessed at the life that went on behind those thick yellow curtains” (80-81). The following chapters demonstrate further changes happening within this family with regard to domestic living places. In 1911, for instance, Eleanor is trying to sell the family house after her father’s death; however, it does not sell easily since the agent wants her to “cut it up into flats” considering the increasing demand for this sort of accommodation (143). In the “1913” chapter Abercorn Terrace remains unsold and characters such as Morris regard it as the embodiment of an “abominable” family life and system, and he feels the house never lets them get rid of it (155).

Sara and Maggie, the daughters of Digby and Eugénie, are perhaps the characters shown to be most adaptable to the social and spatial changes happening around them. They react differently from most other members of the extended Pargiter family to new notions of home and the socio-spatial blending it brings. After their parents die and the family house is sold, they start to live in a poor and shabby apartment in a slum area called Hyams Place due to their financial situation. During a visit to their flat, Rose (one of the Colonel’s daughters) finds the flat itself quite poverty-stricken,

116 containing poor quality objects around such as a sewing machine, an armchair, and a carpet which does not cover the floor. Echoing a version of the thin-walls anxiety that was discussed above, Rose is also disturbed by a number of sounds coming from outside such as a man’s shouting under the window, children’s screams, and a drunken man’s cry, and she repeatedly asks whether they do not find it rather noisy. Sara and Maggie respond bravely, by pointing to the convenience of the location of the flat, such as its closeness to the theatre. At one point in this scene the interference of sounds coming from outside becomes physically intrusive, when vibrations from a passing lorry cause the glasses on the table to jingle. Zimring claims that for some characters such as Rose these interruptions not only imply an increased proximity between the inside and outside spheres, but also (as with the previously noted thin walls in Woolf’s first novel) a threat of contamination regarding social relations (130). However, as mentioned before, for Sara and Maggie, who have been brought up in the open, flexible, tolerant and natural atmosphere of the house of Digby and Eugénie, the new home offers the opportunity of an escape from the restrictions of a single-family house, and they seem content with living in close contact with lower class people.

The narrative continues giving details of Sara and Maggie’s lives in the following chapters/years, and it seems that they remain content with living in close contact with the lower class people. In the “1917” chapter Maggie is portrayed as living with her husband Renny, a French expatriate in “one of the obscure little streets under the shadow of the Abbey” (191). During Eleanor’s visit to their home, a single-family house, Maggie emphasizes that they will dine in the basement since they keep no servants at home. In the “Present Day”, though, Sara is shown to be living alone in a room in a shabby lodging house situated in what her nephew North describes as a “dirty,” “sordid,” and “low-down street” (214), near the Prison Tower. This street is said to consist of “old houses now let out as lodgings” (214) and, similar to Rose’s reaction to the flat shared by Sara and Maggie in earlier years, North, asks why she always chooses slums to live in, and he is disturbed by noises coming in from outside such as children’s screams and a trombone player on the street (214). North is also

117 quite uneasy about the fact that Sara has to share the bath with a Jew in the next room, which brings to mind not only North’s continuing exclusionary approaches to domestic space, but the changes in modern accommodation that were indicated by Mr Grice’s suggestion to cut up Abercorn Terrace into flats and his disappointment with the house not having “more lavatory accommodation” (149).

All these details are of great importance in that they point to the notion of social space which can be restructured and modified in line with new relations and understandings developing through changes happening in society, as suggested by Lefebvre. In addition, all these shabby rooms that middle-class women such as Sara and Maggie occupy when they are looking for a life of their own point to the poverty that even higher class women have to fight. The fact that Sara and Maggie are generally portrayed as content with their living conditions also suggests their being less hindered by patriarchal, class or imperial ideology, which yields a positive and a more pluralistic vision of home and nation in the years to come (as was forecasted by the Italian servants in their old home and as is now, perhaps, indicated by Sara sharing a bathroom with her Jewish fellow-lodger).

The last chapter of the novel, “Present Day”, epitomizes the new spatial dynamic through its portrayal of Delia’s family reunion party, a party which conveys a glimpse of a new understanding of home and nation that allows for the coexistence of different people from different social backgrounds, value systems, and perspectives. The party takes place in a domestic space where “all sorts of people” come together, “doing away with the absurd conventions of English life,” which had always been Delia’s aim (273). Here, “there are nobles and commoners; people dressed and people not dressed; people drinking out of mugs . . . people waiting with their soup getting cold for a spoon to be brought to them” (273), homosexuals, and the colonized like an “Indian in a pink turban” (221), and other foreigners. The party is organized in a hybrid space, consisting of both a private area and an area used by offices, illustrated by the description of a room “on the ground floor which, though an office, had been arranged so that it could be used as a cloak-room,” with the

118 “house-agents’ placards on the wall” (236). Later, it is seen that guests sit on the floor, chairs and office stools, as suggested by Delia: “Sit on the floor, sit anywhere” (273). This mixture of a private event, associated with home and family life and the office furniture and space, evocative of the public world of work, strikingly blurs the differences between the private and public as the party, itself, blurs social boundaries. Therefore, it can be considered in line with what Lefebvre calls “differential space”, which is characterized by ambiguity, conflicting desires, and plurality, and in which individuals can transcend social or cultural boundaries that abound among them. In addition to this unusual space, Delia’s bringing the caretaker’s children to the room and their singing in front of the guests also investigates the ideological limits and possibilities of the middle or upper class experiencing a changing understanding and construction of home: “The children took the slices and stared at them with a curious fixed stare as if they were fierce. But perhaps they were frightened, because she had brought them up from the basement into the drawing room” (294). This contradictory image of the children as “fierce” or “frightened” implies the enduring wide breach between the classes who have occupied different physical and mental spaces and engaged in different tasks at home and who cannot make sense of this new spatial configuration. When the children begin singing, most of the guests find their song “horrible,” “discordant,” “unintelligible” and “hideous” (294). It is observed that only Delia, accustomed to living in close proximity with the less privileged people, and Eleanor, characterized by a constant yearning for a better life for all, appreciate the children’s presence in the party, finding it extraordinarily beautiful (295).

As seen from the depiction of most of the characters in the novel, including the guests in the party, in The Years Woolf does not idealize attitudes toward changing class- related spatial dynamics in the England of her time. It can be said that, except for some instances of appreciation shown by Sara, Maggie, Delia and Eleanor, the characters do not fully embrace the new ways of living in flats or rented rooms in close proximity with lower classes. Particularly female members of the families living in these flats or rented rooms are forced to live in poor urban areas due to their

119 economic possibilities and conditions, but they do not seem to attach as much importance to the problems arising from class segregation in their society as they do to problems related to gender discrimination, which may point to the class ideology instilled by their middle-class education, and the fact that they were beneficiaries of class segregation and were therefore less sensitive to its negative effects, while they were victims of gender discrimination. Besides this ignoring of the class problem, some characters directly express their resentment with the new living conditions which bring them physically close to the marginalized such as the poor and the foreign other. North’s visit to Sara in her rented room provides an example. He criticizes the street for its dirt and gloom, hears some “heavy footsteps outside the door” (234) and then the sounds of somebody, a Jew as Sara tells him, “having bath in the room opposite” (234), which both North and Sara find disgusting because the sounds bring images of this man in his bath to mind. In this scene, Sara’s reaction is more surprising to the reader than North’s, considering her earlier happy portrayal of living close to the marginalized. We see here, that however open-minded and willing to overcome their upbringing a person might be, deeply ingrained reactions cannot be suppressed. On another occasion, when talking to North about his possible return to Africa, Milly and her husband Hugh seem proud of the fixity and unchanged ownership of their land as opposed to the changes happening in other parts of the country. For Milly and Hugh, newly constructed houses for a new class of lower middle class house-owners stand for the intrusion of an inferior class into an England that used to be the preserve of the higher social classes only:

‘Yes, how they’ve spoilt it,’ she was saying. But the resonance had gone out of her voice. ‘Brand-new villas everywhere,’ she was saying . . . ‘Little red villas all along the road,’ she went on. ‘Yes, that’s what strikes me,’ he said, rousing himself to help her, ‘how you’ve spoilt England while I’ve been away.’ ‘But you won’t find many changes in our part of the world, North,’ said Hugh. He spoke with pride. ‘No. But then we’re lucky,’ said Milly. ‘We have several large estates. We’re very lucky,’ she repeated. (258-259)

Considering these examples, it can be claimed that The Years critically exposes how notions of the Victorian middle-class home and its association with nation were

120 constituted by the desire to keep the lower-class, racial and colonial other away, and questions them through reflecting the spatial changes from the late Victorian era to the 1930s with a keen focus on spatial formations and characters’ differing experiences of domestic space. In this way it effectively opposes the construction and perception of the domestic sphere as a place of fixity, homogeneity, and order, arranged to accommodate people from various classes in differing places and conditions, and suggests the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of social space. As told before, even though all these changes that happen in the understanding of domestic space in society are not portrayed as welcomed by most of the characters, the fact that there are some who embrace and live contently with them gives the novel an ending of hope for a more inclusive society in the years to come.

3.3. Restructuring a More Inclusive Social Space of Home/Nation in The Voyage Out and The Years

As discussed in the introductory and theoretical chapters of this dissertation, Woolf’s novels demonstrate a keen understanding of changeability and constructedness of self, social relations, time and space, an understanding that is in line with the spirit of the era they were written in, which witnessed epistemological, psychological and physical changes in spatial and temporal perspectives. In this respect, Snaith and Whitworth draws attention to how these notions – self, social relations, time and space – are inextricably tied to each other in Woolf’s works and how space, particularly, functions as the medium to ask questions about them such as the possibilities of genders regarding their access to power (2). Larsson in Walking Virginia Woolf’s London: An Investigation in Literary Geography (2017) also shares these ideas focusing particularly on Woolf’s portrayal of London and claims that “by following their routes, turns, shortcuts, dead ends, resting points and stops on the map of London, one becomes aware that Woolf constructs the characters in her stories in a very politically conscious way” (27) as if to point to the constructions of self, society, time and space mainly by the dominant ideologies. As she asserts, none of Woolf’s characters can walk just anywhere at any time of the day: “Time, place

121 and gender/class form the conditions of life that the characters have to deal with, accept or challenge” (27). Thacker, in Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003), looks at the issue from the perspective of the spatial borders of inner and outer mainly embraced by the patriarchal social system, and claims that Woolf “constantly plays across the spatial borders of inner and outer, constructing a fiction that shows how material spaces rely upon imaginative conceptualisation, and how the territory of the mind is informed by an interaction with external spaces and places” (152-153). Building upon these ideas, this part of the dissertation claims that questioning the ideological implications woven into the established understandings of space merely as a physical and mental form, Woolf’s novels, The Voyage Out and The Years, lay bare the oppressive socio-spatial order and point to its constructedness through their representation of social space as heterogeneous and dynamic. In this respect, in addition to the issues of gender and class, nationality occupies an important space in their portrayal of domestic space for their subversive politics.

As Marcus has argued, particularly by Woolf’s time there was a widespread association made between home and nation, concerning their perceived and constructed characteristics as enclosure, protection and places of safety (83-88). Thus, the home and its constructed values carried powerful implications of the contemporary patriarchal, class-stratified, nationalist and imperialist social order of the British society. Son particularly looks at this alignment of home and nation during the Victorian era from a broader perspective, not restricting it to gender and class issues (Son 87-88). He draws attention to the fact that emphasis on enclosure, protection, and safety creates a hierarchal division between inside (nation) and outside (places outside nation), leading to the erection of barriers that both physically and morally differentiate insiders from outsiders (87-88). Other scholars such as Jenkins underscore these implications, claiming that – stemming also in part from the geographical situation of their homeland as an island – the British possess a keen “perception of the boundaries between themselves and others,” a common understanding which identifies the national identity with reference to other nations

122 and which encourages imperial expansion as well (Jenkins 4). In this respect, it is useful to refer to prominent theorists such as Benedict Anderson, Ross Poole and Anthony D. Smith who investigate national identity and national consciousness in their works, before readdressing Tuan in his ideas of human beings’ strong attachment to their homeland.

Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) commences by claiming that nations are not natural social units, but cultural constructs which originated from the fall of monarchies and empires as well as from specific advancements in technology, capitalism and literacy (Anderson 6-7). He defines the national community as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). He explains that the nation is imagined since its members can never personally know or meet most of their fellow members but they have in their mind the thought of mutual connection (7). According to him, all communities larger than villages with face-to-face contact are imagined and they are imagined as limited even though their boundaries are elastic and as sovereign since this is a necessary condition for freedom in an age of enlightenment and revolution (6-7). He concedes that one of the most significant effects of nationalism was to create meaning when religion lost its importance in rendering meaning particularly after the Enlightenment and nationalism helped give meaning to people’s efforts for improvement, service to their lords and even to their deaths for their nation (11). He claims that since nations are characterized by symbols of commemoration and convey a feeling of coming out of an immemorial past and gliding into a limitless future, they enabled the “secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning” (11). Celebrating the contribution Anderson has made to the concept of nationalism as a cultural product, Poole focuses more on the relationship between the concepts of nation and identity:

The nation is not just a form of consciousness, it is also a form of self- consciousness. As members of the nation recognise each other through the nation, they also recognise themselves. If the nation is an imagined community, it is also a form of identity. As an imagined community, it exists

123 as an object of consciousness. It is the public embodiment of the nation’s conception of itself. As a form of identity, it exists as a mode of individual self- and other-awareness. In order to understand this dual form of existence, we need to go beyond the concept of imagination to that of culture. (Poole 11)

Following this, she elaborates on how the nation is a cultural object by contending that the nation “exists in and through the language we speak, the public symbols we acknowledge, the history and literature we were taught at school, the music we listen to, the currency we use, the sporting activities we enjoy, and the news bulletins on the television” (12), all of which are cultural artefacts that constitute the social environment we regard as ours and in which we feel “at home”. She goes on to talk about how the notion of homeland also conveys this cultural aspect in addition to its materiality:

Every nation . . . claims its own homeland, one which is described in the national literature, depicted in its art, and celebrated in its music . . . The homeland is not the mute object defined by physical geography . . . it is endowed with a personality and a moral character which complements and sustains the personality and moral character of those who inhabit it (or, in some familiar cases, ought to inhabit it). The homeland is the ground in a near literal sense of national identity. It is significant that the land is conceived as a common possession, something all members of the nation share. (15)

Smith also acknowledges this understanding of homeland as a cultural entity and talks about what aspects modern nations and nationalism involved. He claims that modern nations (which arose in the latter half of the eighteenth century in Western Europe and America) not only possessed “a heightened concern for monitored boundaries and the exclusion of ‘foreigners’” (83), but also a sense of a homeland “of historic, even sacred territory” (83), which Anderson emphasizes in Imagined Communities as well.

After this brief discussion on the concept of nation and nationalism, it is significant to refer to Tuan who shares with the theorists mentioned the idea that human beings possess strong feelings for their homeland and who highlights people’s tendency to regard their country as the centre of the world in Space and Place: The Perspective

124 of Experience. Drawing an association between human beings’ attachment to home and to homeland, Tuan contends that people everywhere in the world possess a feeling of yearning for a home as a ground to anchor their being (Tuan 158) and are inclined to consider their homeland to be the centre of the world, mainly stemming from the fact that attachment to country or space is an enforcement of identity in a world of chaos, change and fluidity. He further remarks that strong attachment to homeland usually results in feelings of superiority and discrimination against people who do not belong to the same land (154). Anticipating Tuan’s ideas regarding homeland and foreign lands and people, Woolf critically uncovers the inclination to subjugate and exclude those from outside the home and nation in her novels, which, as Son contends, demonstrates her “desire to re-establish relationships with others who have been forgotten, suppressed, excluded, or denigrated as inferior or enemies, along with the construction of psychological and physical walls between inside and outside, home and away from home” (139). Acknowledging the fact that this exclusionary attachment to home and nation is closely related to the politics of difference maintained by the dominant ideologies of society, Woolf questions this process of valuation and devaluation by exposing discriminating attitudes and the idea of a superior homeland or nation (which is England in the case of her novels) conveyed mainly by the sayings and deeds of her characters. Her novels, The Voyage Out and The Years, particularly, challenge such perceptions and attitudes by demonstrating outsiders’ and various English characters’ differing feelings of England and other nations (adopting a perspectivist attitude towards space as embraced by Lefebvre and Tuan), by drawing attention to the constructed nature of space with a focus on how the outside is constructed in comparison with nation (anticipating Tuan), and by emphasizing the idea of interconnectedness of spaces (as put forward by Lefebvre), which makes all spaces interdependent upon one another, thus refuting the idea of a superior place.

Woolf’s works demonstrate a close association between home and nation, as is made apparent in a scene of The Years when Rose, the youngest daughter of the Pargiter household, goes out alone secretly in the dark to a local toy store, even though she

125 has been ordered to get her brother Martin to accompany her. During her walk Rose runs into an exhibitionist, which critics such as Larsson regard as Woolf’s answer to Rachel’s question in The Voyage Out about why girls are not allowed to go out on their own in the dark (Larsson 180). Ronchetti adds to this common interpretation by claiming that this scene is Woolf’s integration of her feminist concerns into the issue of nationalist ideologies ingrained in the Victorian home (115). This interpretation is shared by Son as well; who supports it by the fact that from the time she decided to go out alone Rose is seen to engage in a fantasy of being on her way to rescue people for the cause of the “British flag,” which introduces images of patriotism and imperialism into the scene (10). Thinking that she should equip herself with ammunition and provisions, Rose starts her trip by claiming “I am Pargiter of Pargiter’s . . . riding to the rescue!” (23). Imagining herself as riding on an important mission of delivering a secret message to the General in a besieged garrison, she asserts that all their lives depend on this duty:

The British flag was still flying on the central tower – Lamley’s shop was the central tower . . . All their lives depended upon her riding to them through the enemy’s country. Here she was galloping across the desert. She began to trot . . . the pavement stretched before her broad and dark . . . She had only to cross the desert, to ford the river, and she was safe . . . As she ran past the pillar-box the figure of a man suddenly emerged under the gas lamp. “The Enemy!” Rose cried to herself. “The enemy! Bang!” she cried, pulling the trigger of her pistol and looking him full in the face as she passed him. It was a horrid face; white, peeled, pock-marked; he leered at her . . . He almost caught her. She dashed past him. The game was over. She was herself again, a little girl who had disobeyed her sister, in her house shoes, flying for safety to Lamley’s shop. (23)

As seen, Foucault’s idea of “disciplinary” space (separation of domestic and public space in this case), aiming at organising the spaces and controlling the lives of members of a society, pertains to women’s instilled terror of outside spaces here. In this scene, the world outside the home is likened to a desert, a dangerous and hostile country, which shows that Rose has internalized the patriarchal idea that, women and children should remain in the house. In this regard, her encounter with the exhibitionist appears as a form of social punishment to her for breaking the rule of

126 not going out alone in the dark. In addition to this, the idea that the world outside the home is a dangerous place with enemies establishes places outside the home and nation as places threatening the imagined territory of the nation. The scene strikingly draws the attention to how the constructions of both the imperial self and the home entail the construction of the other and of outside as dangerous, a construction that justifies any kind of treatment of the beyond-home territory in the name of protection and superiority. Rose, who is conveyed as one of the female members of the Pargiter household who are imprisoned to a life inside in contrast to the male members who also have a life outside, is later portrayed as a militant suffragette imprisoned for throwing a brick through a window. Although Rose’s use of violence in her fight for women may appear problematic, it is in fact a continuation of her independent infringements of the boundaries placed around women’s “place”, and once again she infringes these boundaries physically and by acting “like a man” (in this case by the use of violence).

In addition to this early implication of the home and nation analogy, The Years is imbued with references to the places outside England such as India, Africa, Egypt and Ireland, and these references usually unveil the characters’ shared nationalist and imperialist stance. For example, Africa is described as a horrible place by different characters on several occasions and other negative characteristics such as extremely hot weather, dreadful silence, no variety of food or any other living substance, and lack of civilization, safety and morality are attributed to it even by characters who have not been there at all such as Eleanor, who tells North, who has been serving in the British colonies, not to go back “to that horrid farm” in Delia’s party in the “Present Day” section of the novel (211). Considering the references made to the places outside England, especially to those made to its colonies in Woolf’s novels, critics such as Seshagiri, rightfully, claim that “Woolf always troubles the master narratives of patriarchy and British imperialism, but she does not additionally trouble England’s representations of the world outside itself” (28). Although her novels expose the common perception of those places and people living there, they never offer radical alternative representations. Starting even from the opening pages of the

127 novel, the construction of foreign places as inferior accompanies the idea of England as a superior and civilized place of superior people. The novel commences with a scene in which the retired Colonel Pargiter is portrayed as spending time with his fellows in their club. As the narrative suggests, he is one of those upper-middle class men who had served their country administering and protecting the colonies of the British Empire: “his companions in the leather armchairs were men of his own type, men who had been soldiers, civil servants, men who had now retired, they were reviving with old jokes and stories now their past in India, Africa, Egypt” (8). The narrative hints at a political secrecy these men share as to “some possible appointment” (8) and describes Colonel’s face “with bright blue eyes that seemed a little screwed up, as if the glare of the East were still in them; and puckered at the corners as if the dust were still in them” (8). Colonel’s ideas regarding the appointment to the East are given as well, which denotes his complete aversion to be there again: “it was disagreeable to him . . . He was out of it all . . . he had no longer any finger in that pie. Gloom settled on his red handsome face as he stood gazing” (8). Added to this there are Rose’s romanticized images of patriotism and militarism as described above, and Delia’s imaginings, of the British in their outposts in the same chapter: “Delia liked listening to her father’s stories about India. They were crisp, and at the same time romantic. They conveyed an atmosphere of officers dining together in mess jackets on a very hot night with a huge silver trophy in the middle of the table” (29). All these details contribute to the image of the Pargiter household itself as a bastion of discriminating attitudes and feelings of the superiority of England. It is also important to mention that even though Delia is portrayed as enchanted by the romance of her father’s colonial past in these lines, the same chapter also points to her contradictory passion for the “cause of liberty” for all (20), later supported by her fervent dedication to Parnell, a powerful Irish nationalist figure. However, Delia ironically ends up marrying Patrick, an Anglo- Irish man who is a passionate supporter of the British Empire: ““What I’m always telling you,” said Patrick, wiping his mouth. “The only civilized country in the whole world,” he added. “Ah, but it’s true,” he sighed, going on with his own thoughts,

128 “I’m sorry to say it – but we’re savages compared with you” (274). As the narrator remarks, Delia’s dreams of achieving equality and liberty for all are shattered again and again as “thinking to marry a wild rebel, she has married the most king- respecting, empire-admiring of country gentlemen” (273). This also reminds us of the parallel situation where the “victim” of patriarchy, Mrs Ramsay, in To the Lighthouse is its strongest supporter at the same time, which can be an implication of the difficulty of changing such deeply ingrained perceptions regarding ways of living in a society due to the fact that its members have long internalized the rules and norms that reign in their society.

The Voyage Out also significantly points to the analogy between the home and nation as places of security, morality and superiority, and how such associations lead to impassable barriers between inside and outside as well as insiders and outsiders. The opening chapters immediately set up an opposing relation between home (the life left behind in England) and a sea voyage (an alternative space of living configured by a moving ship). Characters on the ship feel exhilarated at the moment of departure from the busy city of London, leaving behind restricting signs of civilization: “All the smoke and the houses had disappeared, and the ship was out in a wide space of sea very fresh and clear . . . They had left London sitting on its mud . . . They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same exhilaration at their freedom ran through them all” (22). However, as discussed in the previous sections, they choose to be bounded by the same restricting social codes and, especially after the Dalloways join them on board, this feeling of being away from spatial and ideological codes and constraints is disrupted, particularly by repeated allusions to the British Empire. The Dalloways embark on the ship in Lisbon, which Peach regards as an important detail that brings forth “the motifs of empire, global exploration and conquest” (Peach 51). The narrative makes it clear that the Dalloways take the trip with the purpose of “broadening Mr Dalloway’s mind” to enable him to “serve his country . . . out of Parliament” by visiting politicians and looking at the situation on the African coast and at “certain guns,” a hint at militarism (46-47). During the voyage Clarissa’s thoughts link the space of home with the expansion of the British Empire over distant

129 territories: “Being on this ship seems to make it so much more vivid – what it really means to be English. One thinks of all we’ve done, and our navies, and the people in India and Africa, and how we’ve gone on century after century, sending out boys from little country villages . . . it makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear not to be English!” (49) Richard continues the same imperialist stance, although not through a very positive image, by regarding British politics as “a lasso that opened and caught things, enormous chunks of the habitable globe” (49). Later, when he talks to Rachel about his ideas regarding colonialism, he underscores the superiority of what the British have done regarding building civilizations compared to other nations, in an attempt to consolidate the colonial deeds of the British Empire: “the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men, their records cleaner” (65). This so-called efficiency and guiltlessness is also stressed by another character, Mr Pepper who tells the history of Santa Marina with a deep misery of its being shared by other nations: “the map would undoubtedly be red where it is now an odious green. But it must be supposed that the political mind of that age lacked imagination” (94). This example, charting the nations maintaining Santa Marina can be given as an example of mental space, described by Lefebvre as the conceptualized space of city planners, engineers or scientists. In this regard, Mr Pepper’s telling of the history of Santa Marina by dismissing the natives living there and his reduction of the land to a map exposes the indifferent and hostile attitudes of colonial powers and how they try to reduce colonial lands to such mental representations. In another scene, Mrs Chailey, the servant of the Ambroses, similar to Mr Pepper’s treatment of foreign others, compares the villa in which they will stay in Santa Marina to English houses, and finds it quite inferior:

The indecency of the whole place struck Mrs Chailey forcibly. There were no blinds to shut out the sun, nor was there any furniture to speak of for the sun to spoil . . . she further ventured the opinion that there were rats, as large as terriers at home, and that if one put one’s foot down with any force one would come through the floor . . . “Poor creature!” she murmured to the sallow Spanish servant-girl who came out . . . “no wonder you hardly look like a human being!” (98)

130 As seen, Mrs Chailey’s discontent with the sight involves the Spanish girl as well, an implication of the feeling of superiority Mrs Chailey feels over her Spanish counterpart. Through her degrading comment Mrs Chailey places herself above the Spanish girl, similar to the way in which most other English characters treat outsiders.

Although Woolf’s novels are filled with such examples of othering enacted mainly by the British upon a spatial understanding that draws sharp boundaries between inside and outside with regard to nationality, they also oppose such discriminating attitudes in several ways. In an attempt to shatter the image of England as a superior nation which helped establish and maintain civilizations even outside, these novels convey the characters’ various conflicting feelings towards England. They do this by conveying positive experiences outside the nation (or house) or exposing problems such as violence, gender discrimination, class strife, urbanization, and alienation inside it. There is, however, only one foreign character given the opportunity to express her ideas about England in the four novels analysed in this dissertation: Lucrezia, whose feelings and ideas regarding England shatter the image of England established as the ideal nation. Septimus’s Italian wife Lucrezia in Mrs Dalloway apparently expresses her feelings of loneliness and isolation, perhaps triggered by her sight of an Indian, another foreigner like her in England: “I am alone; I am alone! She cried, by the fountain in Regent’s Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where – such was her darkness” (21). Lucrezia regards London as an “awful city” (61) and regrets giving up “her home” (61) – Italy – because of her marriage. In a sudden fit of anger, she elevates Italy and its people over the English and belittles the flowers, perhaps the ones Mrs Dalloway has been shown to admire in the florist: “Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her sister sat making hats, and the streets crowded every evening with people walking, laughing out loud, not half alive like people here, huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers stuck in pots! ‘For you should see the Milan

131 gardens,’ she said aloud. But to whom?” (20). Lucrezia’s perspective of England is sharply contrasted with that of Clarissa who is at that moment travelling around in London: “. . . the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass band; barrel organs . . . the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June” (2). Lucrezia’s feelings here towards Italy (her home) and England can be explained through Tuan’s ideas regarding strong attachment to the homeland, and the portrayal of London in different pictures constituted by the perspectives of different characters points to the constructed, changeable and heterogeneous nature of the social space as described by Lefebvre.

Apart from Lucrezia, several other characters (British subjects) in The Voyage Out and The Years disrupt the idea of England as a superior nation by referring to social problems in England such as gender discrimination, violence, class strife, urbanization, and alienation, and by pointing to their feelings of not feeling at home in England. For instance, in The Voyage Out, the narrative is filled with glorifications of England and perceptions of other places such as India and colonies in South America as uncivilized and hostile places. However, it is Santa Marina where Rachel is shown to develop her individuality, broaden her horizons in terms of human relations, and find more freedom for herself although it is also there that she eventually dies because of a high fever she develops after visiting a place where natives live. Critics such as Yılmaz regard Rachel’s death as an escape from the overwhelming patriarchal norms in England where she would suffer again after her return after her marriage to Hewet (Yılmaz 116). The novel also subverts the idea that England is a highly developed country providing its members with affluence, security and comfort by uncovering problems happening there, using some of the middle-class characters’ (Rachel, Terence Hewet, Mrs Ambrose and even the Dalloways who frequently underscore the superiority of the British Empire) points of view. Considering the fact that they “came of a class where almost everything was specially arranged” as the narrative says (36), the Dalloways make only very brief references to the problems of their country. While Clarissa remarks that she does not

132 want to live in a world of her own indulging in the delights of music, painting or arts, because she also cares about poor children in the streets (41), Richard refers to the problems arising from class distinctions when he says, “But, good Lord, don’t run away with the idea that I don’t see the drawbacks – horrors – unmentionable things done in our very midst . . . Have you ever been in a factory, Miss Vinrace!” (65) Different from these brief mentions of the Dalloways, Mrs Ambrose, Rachel and Hewet allude to the social issues in several instances, an example of which can be seen when Mrs Ambrose reflects “upon the world she lived in” while walking in London:

Somewhere up there above the pinnacles where the smoke rose in a pointed hill, her children were now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply. As for the mass of streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them, she only felt at this moment how little London had done to make her love it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street. She knew how to read the people who were passing her; there were the rich who were running to and from each others’ houses at this hour; there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant. Already, though there was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and women were nodding off to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath. (22)

Later in Santa Marina, she observes the simplicity and the naturalness of the people with pleasure and takes a quizzical stance on the way that people in her country live prescribed by the social system. Realizing that it is the fifteenth of March, she visualizes the Mall and assumes that there might be a Court in London, and crowds of people waiting in the cold to watch grand carriages go by:

“First there are men selling picture postcards; then there are wretched little shop-girls with round bandboxes; then there are bank clerks in tail coats; and then - any number of dressmakers. People from South Kensington drive up in a hired fly; officials have a pair of bays; earls, on the other hand, are allowed one footman to stand up behind; dukes have two, royal dukes – so I was told – have three; the king, I suppose, can have as many as he likes. And the people believe in it!” Out here it seemed as though the people of England must be shaped in the body like the kings and queens, knights and pawns of the chessboard, so strange were their differences, so marked and so implicitly believed in. (106)

133 In the same vein, Rachel and Hewet often talk about the problems arising from the rigidly prescribed rules of their society particularly regarding gender; it is in fact Hewet who seems passionate about his liberating ideas. Rachel gradually acknowledges her limited lot in her society, and chooses to overcome her feelings of confinement in a passive way initially:

To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It was far better to play the piano and forget all the rest . . . Let these odd men and women – her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley, Helen . . . – be symbols . . . symbols of age, of youth, of motherhood, of learning . . . It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for . . . one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people . . . Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very complacently, blazing into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding as she subsided. (32)

In addition to showing Rachel’s discontent with her restricted lot, these lines are quite significant since Rachel’s calming herself by playing the piano in these lines can be explained through Tuan’s notion of “unoriented space” (Tuan 129). Tuan claims that music and dance enable people to get rid of the difficulties of “purposeful goal-directed life” as they momentarily put an end to the notions of historical time and oriented space for those who practice them, which makes them feel natural and comfortable (129). In this regard, it can be claimed that playing the piano in her room helps Rachel forget about her unpromising lot surrounded by idealized symbols of living by the dominant ideologies of her society. This can again show the important and constitutive role space, place and notions of space play in individuals’ lives.

Similar to the feelings uttered by Mrs Ambrose in The Voyage Out, Peggy’s feelings conveyed during Delia’s reunion party in the “Present Day” chapter of The Years draws attention to problems in England and gradually extends the topic to the problems all humanity faces (266). Hearing the various sounds such as those of horns and sirens coming from public world of London, she starts thinking about far-away sounds of other worlds “indifferent to this world, of people toiling, grinding, in the

134 heart of darkness” (266), and questions Eleanor’s remarks of being happy in this world, which she herself finds full of hypocrisy, cruelty, misery, and destruction:

But how can one be “happy,” . . . in a world bursting with misery? On every placard at every street corner was Death; or worse - tyranny; brutality; torture; the fall of civilisation; the end of freedom. We here, she thought, are only sheltering under a leaf, which will be destroyed. And then Eleanor says the world is better, because two people out of all those millions are “happy” . . . I do not love my kind. Again she saw the ruby-splashed pavement, and faces mobbed at the door of a picture palace; apathetic, passive faces; the faces of people drugged with cheap pleasures; who had not even the courage to be themselves, but must dress up, imitate, pretend. And here, in this room, she thought, fixing her eyes on a couple . . . But I will not think, she repeated; she would force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came. (266-267)

Even though she is criticized by Peggy for her optimistic stance on life, Eleanor, too, finds England “disappointing,” claiming that “she felt no affection for her native land – none whatever” (138). It is also important to talk about her nephew North’s similar feelings towards England, because he has lived in what other characters call “a horrid farm”: Africa. Although North is shown to have missed things such as the liveliness, abundance of food, and processed products of life in England while serving in Africa, he also acknowledges the problems inside such as the monotonous and unsatisfactory lives of the working class, the noise, the traffic, and people talking only about money and politics (218-219). Considering these examples, it can be said that the fact that characters such as North and Eleanor in The Years and Rachel, Hewet and Helen in The Voyage Out have a more critical distance from their nation, questioning the ideals of their social order may be related to the journeys they take to foreign lands. Placing themselves out of the existing order of their society through their travels, they question the values of their homeland and challenge the image of England as the embodiment of the greatest civilization, an idea embraced by most other characters in these novels.

These novels also draw attention to the constructed nature of the national space, which challenges the perception of England as the ideal place of security, order, unity, and comfort for all, by demonstrating how the characters try to make sense of

135 unfamiliar things that they see outside England through the familiar things inside, which brings us again at Tuan’s idea that people’s feelings and interpretation of space are heavily influenced by the value systems of their own culture and society. Characterized by this inclination to filter the images of outside through those of inside, Woolf’s characters are usually bounded by the limitations that their cultural mind-set imposes on encounters with foreign spaces. Apart from the long Lucrezia scene from Mrs Dalloway, The Voyage Out proves to be the only example of such portrayals among our selected novels with its story of a journey outside England. In such scenes the home or nation serves as the stable point of reference, through which an unfamiliar outside is comprehended and constructed. For example, Hewet wants Rachel to talk in detail about the atmosphere of her home, which might result from his need to learn about her in more familiar surroundings than the unfamiliar and somewhat destabilising South American setting of their meeting: “‘Let’s imagine it’s a Wednesday. You’re all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt Lucy there, and Aunt Clara here’; he arranged three pebbles on the grass between them” (236). Responding to Hewet’s request, Rachel remembers the scenes and objects from her domestic life in England, filling the immense space of South American land with images from home. In another part of the novel, as the characters on board land on Santa Marina, they immediately engage in making sense of the new environment by comparing it to things in England and by making associations. In this section of the novel, Mrs Chailey compares the house that they are to live in to English houses and finds it inferior (which is quite similar to Lucrezia’s comparison of Italian and English flowers in Mrs Dalloway):

The villa was a roomy white house, which, as is the case with most continental houses, looked to an English eye frail, ramshackle, and absurdly frivolous, more like a pagoda in a tea-garden than a place where one slept. The garden called urgently for the services of gardener . . . A garden smoothly laid with turf, divided by thick hedges, with raised beds of bright flowers, such as we keep within walls in England, would have been out of place upon the side of this bare hill. (97)

136 Later on, when they take the trip to the place where the natives live, they see a resemblance between an open space covered with grass to an English park, and it ignites “a childlike excitement in them” (315): “It might be Arundel or Windsor,” Mr Flushing continued, “if you cut down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by Jove, look!” (315) As seen from these examples, once they are placed in an unfamiliar and unknown land outside their nation, characters are inclined to assess and make sense of what they see around through their repertoire of national ideals and constructions, which renders the idea of superiority of a nation subjective and fallible.

These novels also overthrow the idea of a superior nation by highlighting the interconnectedness of all spaces (an idea introduced by Lefebvre as discussed previously), which uncovers the fact that all spaces are interdependent and not disconnected at all. Such an understanding can be strikingly observed in The Years during a scene when Eleanor visualizes the underground space of the city connecting every space of the city in her way home: “The shops were turning into houses; there were big houses and little houses; public houses and private houses. And here a church raised its filigree spire. Underneath were pipes, wires, drains . . . Her lips began moving. She was talking to herself. There’s always a public house, a library and a church, she was muttering” (72). As seen, the vision of the underground system challenges the perception of the Victorian house as a private haven separated from the city around it, uncovering the connection of so-called private space of home with wider public space, and implying the existence of cultural and ideological links between these two distinguished spaces as well.

Woolf’s novels underscore the same idea of the interconnectedness of spaces in the relationship between home/nation and abroad, which points to the fragility and dependence of England on other nations and its colonies. In this regard, The Years particularly exposes how everyday life in England is conditioned by the other outside, through frequent allusions to the contemporary political situation in Ireland and to India, Egypt or Africa. In the “1914” section of the novel, finding it difficult

137 to start a conversation at a dinner party, Martin offers three subjects to talk about, one of which is Ireland, a hint at how Ireland was a common topic of talks at that time. His offer ignites the discussion regarding Ireland immediately, ending his discomfort: “He threw himself into their conversation. It was about politics of course, about Ireland” (175). In this regard, the figure of Charles Stewart Parnell also appears in several parts of the novel, more than any British politician, showing the influence of an Irish nationalist man on Londoners and intertwining the imperial centre and its colonial space. In fact, the death of Parnell is set up as the main event of the year 1891, with various characters’ reactions to the news. These reactions are conveyed in quite lengthy descriptions as observed in the description of how Eleanor learns the news:

“Death” was written in very large black letters. Then the placard blew straight, and she read another word: “Parnell.” “Dead” . . . she repeated. “Parnell.” She was dazed for a moment. How could he be dead – Parnell? She bought a paper. They said so . . . “Parnell is dead!” she said aloud. She looked up and saw the sky again; clouds were passing; she looked down into the street. A man pointed at the news with his forefinger . . . She must go to Delia. Delia had cared. Delia had cared passionately. What was it she used to say – flinging out of the house, leaving them all for the Cause, for this man? Justice, Liberty? She must go to her. This would be the end of all her dreams. (80)

Later on, the narrative gives the same meticulous and detailed attention to how other characters such as Colonel, Morris and Eugenie learn the news and how they feel about it, and the news of his death is followed by gossip about his relationship with his wife in the same vein. These detailed passages apparently demonstrate how events in colonized lands such as the death of a public figure impact the feelings or the daily lives of different individuals in England in different ways, suggesting the unbreakable connection of all spaces. In addition to the issues of Ireland, the situation in Africa also surfaces at several points in the novel, an important example of which can be seen during North’s discussion with Hugh about Africa. Hugh tells North, “I hope you’re going to stay in England now . . . though I dare say it’s a fine life out there” (258) and they continue their discussion with “Africa and the paucity of jobs”

138 in England (258). The relation made here between Africa and the paucity of jobs in England highlights how Africa “out there” alleviates the unemployment problems at home, strikingly pointing to England’s dependence on its colonial lands.

Similarly, in The Voyage Out the close connection between and interdependence of England and its colonies are underscored in an attempt to challenge the idea of a self- sustaining, superior nation. This can be seen particularly in the opening scene of the novel in which different parts of England are rendered in relation to each other during the journey the Ambroses take from the place where they live to the place where they will embark on the ship for their voyage to Santa Marina. The narrative states that the cab the Ambroses take steadily travels along the same road until it soon withdraws them from the West End and “plunge” them into a big manufacturing place “where the people were engaged in making things, as though the West End, with its electric lamps, its vast plate-glass windows all shining yellow, its carefully- finished houses, and tiny live figures trotting on the pavement, or bowled along on wheels in the road, was the finished work” (4). Mrs Ambrose reflects on the smallness of the West End, perplexed by this vast manufacturing area of London, and gradually notices the overwhelming differences between this part of the city and her living place:

Observing that they passed no other hansom cab, but only vans and waggons, and that not one of the thousand men and women she saw was either a gentleman or a lady, Mrs Ambrose understood that after all it is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of innumerable poor people . . . her husband read the placards pasted on the brick announcing the hours at which certain ships would sail for Scotland . . . From a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons with sacks, half obliterated too in a fine yellow fog, they got neither help nor attention. (4-5)

As Peach claims, the description made in these lines imply that “the novel . . . ‘reads’ the social organization of England according to a model of imperialism” (Peach 49). Pointing to the differences between the West End and East End (referring to the West End as the finished product of the East End) and evoking the colonies of the British Empire with the mention of the sacks, a reference to the circulation of raw materials

139 which enables production in England, the novel ingeniously hints at interconnectedness of these spaces and refutes the idealization of the colonial powers as absolute, enduring, self-sustaining and homogeneous.

Considering the discussions and examinations made in this section of the dissertation, it can be asserted that The Voyage Out and The Years are concerned with the notion of domestic space not only regarding the issues and relations of gender and class for their subverting politics but also with respect to those of nationality. Critically exposing the ideological implications woven into the long- lasting understanding of space solely as a physical and mental form, they portray space as a social form as well, drawing attention to its constructedness, heterogeneity and dynamicity. They point to the common analogy among the British between the home and nation as places of security, morality and superiority, and how such associations give way to impassable barriers between inside and outside as well as between insiders and outsiders. Anticipating Tuan’s ideas about people’s perceptions of their own nation and other nations, they demonstrate the inclination to subjugate and exclude people from outside the home and nation by uncovering discriminating ideas and attitudes, and idealization of England as a superior nation, mainly through the sayings and deeds of characters. They also undermine such perception and attitudes by drawing the attention to the constructed nature of space (through their portrayal of the outsiders’ and various English characters’ differing feelings and ideas of England, and how the characters who are abroad are inclined to make sense of the new environment through the images of their nation), and by emphasizing the idea of interconnectedness and interdependence of spaces, which challenges the idea of a self-sustaining and autonomous superior place.

140

CHAPTER 4

QUESTIONING THE ASSUMED FIXITY AND SUPERIORITY OF PUBLIC SPACES IN THE VOYAGE OUT AND MRS DALLOWAY

Investigations carried out in Chapter 3 of this dissertation have shown that The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years, represent domestic space in ways that go against the fixed and homogenous, physical and mental constructions of domestic space (dictated mainly by dominant social discourses such as patriarchal, class-based and imperialist systems) that occupied Woolf’s society. Even though these novels do not offer new or alternative visions of domestic space in their representations, they nevertheless show the need for change by rendering social criticism through their representations of domestic space, and by encouraging an understanding of space as a social entity which is subjective, multi-faceted, heterogeneous, dynamic and open to change. Keenly aware of the interconnectedness of different spaces, Woolf’s novels treat public space in similar ways, through a focus on London and its public spaces, foregrounding the long- lasting negative notion of space in individuals’ lives and fiction again. This part of my study focuses on Woolf’s representations of public spaces in two of her novels, which are The Voyage Out and Mrs Dalloway. They convey London to the reader through different perceptions of characters, which changes depending on time and distance as well as on their gender, class, and nationality, which makes it possible to analyse them through the insights of Lefebvre, Foucault and Tuan, who are united in their ideas of space as socially and ideologically constructed, and as constituting a critical role in individuals’ lives. They critically demonstrate how London is imbued with places full of boundaries regarding gender, class and nationality, which makes

141 individuals feel oppressed and which, in this way, questions the practices that govern the so-called superior public world of men. Moreover, these novels also show how these boundaries are overcome in some instances, rendering the notion of space multiple, heterogeneous, dynamic and flexible. In this respect, in addition to underlining Lefebvrian and Tuanian aspects of such an understanding of space and place, this part of the dissertation also investigates these novels through insights of Foucault (concerning his idea of heterotopia) and Bakhtin (concerning his idea of chronotope) in those parts of the novels where the boundaries and limitations surrounding individuals’ lives are transcended, which strikingly points to the dynamic nature of space and place.

A quick glance over Virginia Woolf’s fictional works reveals that London serves as the main setting in these novels. London is conveyed to the reader with the names of its streets, parks and monuments and particularly with the walks characters take (Larsson 27). These include a short walk taken by Mr and Mrs Ambrose in The Voyage Out, long walks, such as Jacob’s early morning walk from Hammersmith to Holborn in Jacob’s Room, the most discussed walk of Mrs Dalloway as flâneuse (Tseng 247-258) through Westminster and Mayfair in Mrs Dalloway, and the walk of the persona whom critics regard as Woolf’s alter ego (Larsson 1) in A Room of One’s Own, which takes place between the men’s college in the centre of the fictitious university town of Oxbridge and the women’s college on the outskirts of the same town. Names of streets and addresses are carefully specified except for few instances. According to Larsson, these walks with their routes, shortcuts, turns, resting points, dead ends and stops make it apparent that Woolf’s fictional works construct the characters, their stories and various places in which they wander in a very politically conscious way considering the fact that these characters cannot walk just anywhere at any time in history or any time of the day (27). Place, time, gender, class and nationality determine the conditions of living that the characters have to cope with, accept or challenge. Anchored in London’s web of streets, Woolf’s characters are offered different opportunities and obstacles in these streets, depending on the period in which they are placed, as well as on their gender, class

142 and nationality. For example, in the “1880” section of The Years, Colonel Pargiter is seen throwing anxious glances to the right and left in front of a small house in Westminster (9), as he does not want to be seen in this place. Thirty-five years after his visit, his daughter Eleanor goes to the same place to visit her cousin Maggie and her family, which clearly shows both the social decline that has affected the family and possibly also the social transformation of the district, that is now suitable for the less well-off daughters of established families to live in.

Woolf’s interest in London and her fascination with its beauty, its lifting up of her spirits, and its stimulation of her mind can be clearly witnessed in her diaries as well, in which she says, for instance,

London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, and get carried into beauty without raising a finger. The nights are amazing . . . And people pop in and out, lightly, divertingly like rabbits; and I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal’s back or red and yellow with sunshine, and watch the omnibuses going and coming and hear the old crazy organs. One of these days I will write about London, and how it takes up the private life and carries it on, without any effort. Faces passing lift up my mind; prevent it from settling, as it does in the stillness at Rodmell. (Woolf, A Writer’s Diary 61)

As Lee states, Woolf started walking through the city when she moved with her siblings from the family home in Kensington to more down-at-heel Bloomsbury, following her father’s death in 1904 (Lee 202). Wandering through the city may have meant her liberation from the restrictive Victorian living conventions she associated with her parents’ household. She continued these walks while she was living in Bloomsbury with Leonard Woolf, and when they were living in the suburb of Richmond between 1914 and 1924 for her mental health, she missed the city’s liveliness. She says of London, “I might go & hear a tune, or have a look at a picture, or find out something at the British Museum, or go adventuring among human beings. Sometimes I should merely walk down Cheapside. But now I’m tied, imprisoned, inhibited” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1: 250). Katz relates the freedom Woolf found in walking in London to the increasing mobility women gained in this period, which can be witnessed in middle-class women’s entrance into the

143 professions, public space and new urban institutions which arose for them (Katz 398):

The most striking were spaces designed for consumers, from department stores to teashops . . . Many were aimed at an audience less economically privileged than Woolf: female clerks and women shopping for mass- marketed goods in Oxford Street department stores or buying inexpensive meals in modest but genteel restaurants. Woolf herself was more likely to describe visiting museums, art galleries, and symphonies, and smaller, more exclusive shops rather than department stores. But these innovations signal a city in which women were newly expected to be visible in the streets. (Katz 398-399)

Larsson maintains that Woolf enjoyed walking in London, as she also did in the countryside, tremendously, which often took several hours a day, either alone or accompanied by others such as her husband (1). Woolf frequently acknowledged in her diaries that walking in London and its hustle and bustle gave her the opportunity of thinking. After moving back to London from the isolated life of Rodmell, Woolf wrote in her diary: “I could wander about the dusky streets in Holborn & Bloomsbury for hours. The things one sees – & guesses at – the tumult & riot & busyness of it all – Crowded streets are the only places, too, that ever make me what-in-the-case of another-one-might-call think” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.1: 9). Later, in the same entry, Woolf continues by stating how she goes out, after working at home, to “refresh her stagnancy”, walking in the streets of London. Penner, also, points to Woolf’s acknowledgment of London as a crucial stimulus to her work, which also provided her a means of shedding her gendered identity and attaining the androgynous self she thought essential to the creative mind (Borden and Rendell 271). Woolf clearly reflects this idea in her essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” in which London offers her rambler the dynamic excitement of other people’s lives and the possibility of imaginatively entering the minds of people she stumbles across on the streets. She recommends walking in the early evening between four and six, when darkness and lamplights give a feeling of “irresponsibility” which enables to “shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so

144 agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room” (155). She, then, explains how the ego-identity can be broken in this liminal state while walking through the streets of London at these hours: “The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye” (156). This enormous eye wanders through the streets, watching the unknown passers-by, looking through a window to the privacy of a drawing room, observing the urban scene and stories and memories it contains and reflects upon the split nature of self which has yielded to unity only “for convenience’s sake” (161). As Penner claims, Woolf’s flâneur, in this respect, bears a strong resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s idea of a flâneur in that Woolf’s flâneur walks not only for pleasure but also to use the experience as a source for her critical and creative works (272):

It is not insignificant that Woolf’s “pretext” for her twilight ramble is the need to buy a pencil. As she observes, “London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play, a story and a poem without any trouble, save that of moving legs thorough the streets”. Indeed, the descriptions of the city from Woolf’s diary often resurfaced in published pieces.

Penner also puts an emphasis on the title “Street Haunting” which evokes an image of a disembodied, gender-neutral being which wanders through the corporeality of the city life (272). As Penner maintains, this unidentified being lacking a specific gender or individuality demonstrates Woolf’s emphasis on the need for androgyny for writing as a way of looking beyond the boundaries of the gendered self (272). Walking through the streets and escaping the individual identity, the narrator of “Street Haunting” claims, one can “put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others” (165). As Penner puts forward, Woolf, in this way, strives to escape other aspects of her social circumstances too, “by pursuing in her imagination the various objects, events, and people she encounters on her twilight rambles, effectively embarking on a series of different subjectivities – from a dwarf, to a washerwoman, and to a publican” (272). However, this is not to suggest that walking in the city always allows for this escape from identity. On the contrary, Woolf’s

145 fictional and non-fictional works often represent the city as the place where individuals are forced to confront the fixed and restricting boundaries of the public realm, a recurrent example of which is women facing its patriarchal nature. Woolf was particularly aware of the difficulties, discriminations and fears many women experienced when walking in the city. In this respect, Snaith claims that the issue of women’s entry into the public world appears most strongly in The Pargiters, the early version of The Years (39). In one part of the novel, the narrator strikingly attracts the attention to the danger and disease public areas are associated with for women. The implication is that middle-class women walking alone in Piccadilly was still considered completely improper and seen as similar to women exposing themselves, which can serve as another telling example to what Foucault names “disciplinary” space, controlling the lives and actions of individuals in a society:

Eleanor and Milly and Delia could not possibly go for a walk alone– save in the streets round about Abercorn Terrace, and then only between the hours of eight-thirty and sunset . . . For any of them to walk in the West End even by day was out of the question. Bond Street was as impassable, save with their mother, as any swamp alive with crocodiles. The Burlington Arcade was nothing but a feverstricken den as far as they were concerned. To be seen alone in Piccadilly was equivalent to walking up Abercorn Terrace in a dressing gown carrying a bath sponge. (37)

Snaith remarks that Woolf’s perception and experience of public spaces express the ambivalence felt by many women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (41). For women, while the city meant an enactment of increased freedom and rights, at the same time it both constituted and was constituted by the very same institutions which denied such freedoms. Despite the freedom the city offered, it was also the place in which women’s perception as outsiders was reinforced by the patriarchal system:

Entering the public realm was a stroll and a trespass . . . For Woolf, this ambivalence also extends into her reaction to the city as a writer. It fuels her writing at the same time as preventing her from writing, both because she needs to withdraw in order to do so and because it reminds her of her own exclusion. She can subvert the patriarchal institutions of the city through

146 writing and she can claim the city by walking, but it will also continue to efface her, position her as the flâneuse, observing. (Snaith 41)

Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional works reflect this ambiguity as well as the clear- cut divisions drawn between private and public spaces of her society as mentioned in the previous sections of this study. Her works particularly touch upon differing treatments of genders in a variety of matters such as opportunities in education, professional lives and publication through representations of private and public spaces. In A Room of One’s Own, she seems to refer to these different treatments in publication in a criticizing manner when the narrator says,

It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop – everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. (67)

Considering Woolf’s criticism of such discriminations between different genders in different areas of life such as education and publication, it can be claimed that Woolf persistently foregrounds the traditionally negative space of the marginalized such as women, lower-classes and people from different nations in her fiction.

As Snaith asserts, the terms “private” and “public” were useful to Woolf in that she wanted to increase women’s access to various public spheres such as the city, employment, and publication (157). In this regard, Penner states that Woolf believed that the inferiority of women’s status compared to men’s in her society arose largely from women’s limited access to power in public spaces such as in academia and government (272). The well-known scene in A Room of One’s Own points to this when the narrator repeatedly finds herself banned from the chapel, library and the turf of a college quadrangle: “Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me” (A Room and One’s Own and Three Guineas 7). She is not only physically excluded, but these boundaries interrupt the flow of her thoughts,

147 hindering her from wandering into the grounds of imagination and intellect, which were considered the preserve of men. The narrator feels a similar feeling of exclusion in certain public spaces of London: “Again, if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical” (127). Woolf particularly regards Whitehall, Westminster, and St James’s as ideological spaces of patriarchal system where she is profoundly aware of her gendered identity (Borden and Rendell 273).

Among all her works, Three Guineas uses the terms “private” and “public” most explicitly and often, and it thematises women’s exclusion from education, professions, and the public sphere. It demonstrates the variety of levels on which the private and public distinction works for Woolf; as maintained by Snaith, Three Guineas builds up such a distinction merely to undo it later (Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations 158). This trespassing of the conventional boundaries between separate spheres for women and men can most apparently be seen in the part which talks about the letter from the barrister which is shown to initiate the writing of Three Guineas, an event satirically claimed to be “perhaps unique in the history of human correspondence”, because a woman is being consulted by a man for her opinion on a public issue, the prevention of war (A Room and One’s Own and Three Guineas 153). This initial trespassing can be regarded as the beginning of a large-scale crossing of the gap which exists between the male barrister and female narrator.

Three Guineas reflects the division between the private and public mainly in terms of employment and economics: while men work in the public sphere and are paid for it, women are not paid for their work in the private sphere. The private realm is conveyed as similar to the working world in that it too is a sphere of employment, but of unpaid employment, which demonstrates the continuity and interconnectedness of private and public sphere as in Lefebvre’s ideas. The maintenance and security of the male, public realm of education and employment is

148 enabled by its distinction from and the continuity of the private realm of the home. The narrator says that from the private home “the world of professional, of public life . . . undoubtedly looks queer” (176), but it is from the world of the City, the Law Courts, Parliament, the Bank of England, St Paul’s “that the private house . . . has derived its creeds, its laws, its clothes and carpets, its beef and mutton” (176). The educated man’s home is financially and ideologically determined and maintained by the male world of employment. In addition to being represented as a physical space constructed in opposition to the public world, the private sphere is also shown as a way of perceiving, a “vantage point” (183). While men consider schools and universities “the source of memories and of traditions innumerable”, the daughters of educated men see “congregation of buildings” representing “a schoolroom table; an omnibus going to a class; a little woman with a red nose who is not well educated herself but has an invalid mother to support; an allowance of £50 a year with which to buy clothes” (156–7). Looking at the male world of education and employment, the female narrator sees only what the patriarchy gives her in stark contrast to male privileges: Oxbridge appears “to educated men’s daughters like petticoats with holes in them, cold legs of mutton” (157). As seen, the narrative connotes that private and public realms are constructed and subjective, which indirectly yields hopes via the changeability and dynamicity of social space.

In Three Guineas, the private and public distinction also functions in the use of a wide variety of materials such as newspaper articles, reports, statistics, letters, biographies, poems, and photographs in the narrative. Initially, a public/private distinction is established between these kinds of documents. While biography and autobiography are seen as records of private life and individuality, public genres are exemplified as reports and newspaper articles, which are “history in the raw” and deal with public affairs, the life of a society (159). However, these terms are then complicated and the distinction does not carry through into associations with subjectivity or objectivity. The narrator collects facts from biography and claims that public sources can be opinionated as well: “Even outsiders can consult the annals of those public bodies which record not the day-to-day opinions of private people, but

149 use a larger accent and convey through the mouths of Parliaments and Senates the considered opinions of bodies of educated men” (188). Starting with a common dichotomy of genre, the narrative later shows all texts to be shaped by ideology, challenging the private and public binary functioning in literary genres as well.

As for any improvement in women’s position in society, Three Guineas underscores the idea that it depends largely on their being thought of differently, and on their not being used as mirrors “reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (xiv). The narrative’s claim that “we think back through our mothers if we are women” (69) has also served as an enormously powerful support for a kind of feminism aiming to establish a distinct women’s history and literary tradition. In addition to the changes in perceptions of women and the need to construct a distinct female history and literary tradition, the narrative supports the idea of women entering the public world of employment. However, women are also warned to remain “safe from publicity and its poison” (297). Women are expected to renounce acts of ceremony or publicity, such as medals and honours (291), as a protest against joining a partriarchally constructed system, as Woolf herself rejected a Doctorate of Letters from Manchester University (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.5: 147). In this regard, the “silent, private” room of one’s own becomes a liberating place in which women can express themselves without any restrictions, and from which a variety of their experience can be spoken (Three Guineas 297). Remaining intentionally vague, the narrator remarks: “we, remaining outside, will experiment not with public means in public but with private means in private” (321).

Given its importance in demonstrating discriminations in society regarding gender (in particular), class and nationality, looking at the private/public division in Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional works is also a useful way to investigate how Woolf has been constituted by literary scholars: how she has been associated with one side or another of the division. To illustrate, David Daiches claims that Woolf’s writing is basically private in content. He contrasts Woolf’s style with that of the Victorian novel and argues that Woolf limits herself to “private illumination” as opposed to

150 the Victorian novel’s inclination to make use of “public symbols” (189). Quentin Bell also regards Woolf as highly private and unconcerned with politics and the public realm. He presents Woolf’s situation as pathologically private, “terrified of the world, terrified of exposing herself,” a state arising from her “madness” (Virginia Woolf: A Biography 126), and Elaine Showalter considers A Room of One’s Own as a kind of withdrawal or exile (285). This construction of Woolf as fragile, solely private and apolitical has led to dismissing her significant role as a public intellectual and her engagement with the public world through her works; but this is now changing. As Brenda Silver claims, while “this image still has a great deal of currency, at least in the non-academic world today” (285), the valuable work of feminist literary criticism since the 1970s has acknowledged Woolf’s keen involvement in the issues of “real” world such as her work for women’s suffrage in 1910, for the Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild and the Rodmell Labour Party (Silver 35-36). Moreover, critics have shown the complex ways in which politics informs her fictional writing, proving her constant interest in and engagement with public matters. This study hopes also to make a significant contribution to scholarship that attempts to show how Woolf was interested in conveying the social and political issues of her society in her fictional works in that, it investigates whether Woolf’s fictional works render and challenge these issues through their representations of different spaces, foregrounding a formerly ignored constitute of narrative: space.

4.1. Challenging the Ideals of Peace and Humanization in Public Spaces: A London of Darkness in The Voyage Out

In 1915 Woolf eventually managed to get her first novel, The Voyage Out, published. The book has received various reviews since then. Even though some critics such as Mitchell Leaska consider it to be “a strange, difficult, and still unpopular book” (12), others focus on different aspects of the novel and value it for its making possible investigations on those aspects. In this respect, Ruotolo stresses that the novel creates “a heroine who will not grow into the world as it is constituted” (21), and Froula

151 analyses it for the difficult choices a female artist had to make in the late Victorian era (136). Friedman, on the other hand, claims that the novel presents Rachel as a “model reader” who can read “both books and life” in balance (113). The interpretation of Rachel’s demise in relation to the meaning of the novel has also been taken upon by a number of critics such as Hermione Lee, Mitchell Leaska, Thomas Caramagno, Alex Zwerdling, and Roger Poole. While some critics regard the novel as a precursor to The Waves due to its pessimism, Patricia Laurence and Mark Hussey investigate Woolf’s use of silence in it. In addition, the novel has been examined for its feminist social critique, an example study of which has been done by Herbert Marder in Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf (1968). However, it is only in the 1990s that critics such as Mark Hussey, Helen Wussow, and Kathy Phillips, started to look into the novel in terms of social critique. In this regard, this part of my study aims to contribute to the existing scholarship on the novel regarding its critique of social conventions and practices that lead to and perpetuate discriminations in society with a special focus on how the novel uses its representations of public space to make its criticisms.

The Voyage Out commences with a sentence which foreshadows how moving around in London whether on foot, by bus or car would become a fundamental topic in Woolf’s writings: “As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm” (1). The opening scene of the novel gradually elaborates on the details of this trip, which is taken by two characters, Ridley and Helen Ambrose, from the center of London to a ship waiting at Wapping, which will then take them to a fictional country called Santa Marina, an ex-colony of the British Empire. Considering the fact that in Western writing traditions a voyage generally expresses positive connotations such as “progress, the quest for knowledge, freedom as freedom to move, self-awareness as an Odyssean enterprise, salvation as a destination to be attained” (Van Den Abbeele xv), Woolf’s choice of a voyage out of England as the topic of her first novel can be taken as her interest in exploring what happens to characters (and specifically young women such as her novel’s protagonist) when they try to distance themselves from the social

152 spaces of England. Anticipating Tuan’s ideas of modern tools and machines such as a bicycle or a car as enlarging “the human sense of space”, responding to their “slightest wish”, and creating “a world of speed, air, and movement” (53), The Voyage Out brings the existing order of the British society into question by placing its characters outside that order in Santa Marina (through a ship voyage) and giving them the opportunity of taking a critical distance from it. Arising from this, as Jane Wheare puts forward in her introduction to The Voyage Out, the novel is packed with “many of the ideas and issues that Woolf held most dear, and to which she would return throughout her career as a writer” (20): issues of class, gender, nationality, writing, religion and who is able to move around where, how and when.

The Voyage Out conveys its particular criticism of women’s limited and suppressed conditions, and their lack of unrestrained freedom of movement; it shows the imposition of ignorance and discrimination upon the objects of a dehumanizing class consciousness, and the degrading treatment of people of other nationalities, all with a particular focus on the spatialization of British society. Except for the trip that Helen and Ridley take from the wealthy district of London they reside in to the Embankment (which already points to the class and imperialist issues of their society), London does not serve as the physical setting in the novel. From this start, even though the central action of the narrative does not physically take place in London, the novel remains largely a story of London society: of its women and men, poor and wealthy, of its conventions and practices. As Larsson states, London is “the city that has shaped the lives and social routines of the people Woolf portrays. London is the backdrop to their thinking and their lives, and London is where they want [sic] and are going to return to” (20). That is, although the steamer Euphrosyne takes the characters to a place in South America where most of the narrative unfolds, London continues to occupy a great space in the minds, attitudes, and behaviour of the characters. Even after spending a great deal of time in their new living space, the socio-political problems of London are carried with and within them, like stowaways on this voyage. The narrative is thus shown to adopt a Lefebvrian understanding of space as consisting mental and social space, as well as physical space. The English

153 characters thus carry the mental construction of London into Santa Marina and continue lives that are organized and spatialized just as they were in London, illustrating the point made later by Tuan, that of Tuan in that every culture creates and maintains its own unique way of spatialization (34). The narrative provides another perspective on spatialization by also conveying how Santa Marina organizes the lives of its inhabitants and how it constructs its spaces, which are efficiently contrasted with those of London. Moreover, the narrative includes characters (most importantly Helen, Rachel and Hewet), who become critical of London upon seeing the different practices or spatial regulations they encounter in the new culture, which challenges the idea of the British Empire as the superior nation as claimed in the previous chapter of this study. London is also shown as fully transcended in a few moments (in two forest scenes of the novel) when some characters can act in ways which are deemed improper in their culture. These forest scenes in which characters think or act outside the jurisdiction of their normalised thoughts or actions, and certainly beyond socialized norms, bring to mind Bachelard’s idea of “intimate immensity” as experienced in a forest:

We do not have to be long in the woods to experience the always rather anxious impression of “going deeper and deeper” into a limitless world. Soon, if we do not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are. It would be easy to furnish literary documents that would be so many variations on the theme of this limitless world, which is a primary attribute of the forest . . . “Forests, especially, with the mystery of their space prolonged indefinitely beyond the veil of tree-trunks and leaves, space that is veiled for our eyes, but transparent to action, are veritable psychological transcendents.” (Bachelard 185)

In these spatial ways, the narrative effectively renders a social and political critique of the British society and implies the need for, and the possibility of, change.

As investigated by a number of critics and scholars, the title of the novel serves as a metaphor for different types of voyages out, but particularly for a journey into the existing practices and conventions of the adult world for its young protagonist, Rachel Vinrace. In the second chapter of the novel the narrative strengthens this implication by making an association between the ship and a young woman: “The

154 sea might give her death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigor and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things, for as a ship she had a life of her own” (27). In these lines, description of the ship as “a virgin unknown of men” particularly brings to mind Tuan’s idea of open space, here the space of the ship which is on the sea, as having “no fixed pattern of established human meaning . . . like a blank sheet on which meaning may be imposed” (54); it is therefore, in many ways, vulnerable. This description foreshadows young Rachel’s sexual harassment (being kissed) by Richard Dalloway on the ship later. The novel also indicates its aim to convey, through the story of a young female’s journey, Rachel’s awakening to matters of her society, which are usually related to the patriarchal system of her society. Even though young and naïve Rachel opens up her mind to the effects of governing patriarchal, class-stratified and imperialist systems on life in the country she has left behind, and understands how these domineering systems are all related to and strengthen each other, the narrative makes Rachel die towards the end, and continues for two chapters after her death. Still, Rachel’s voyage to South America, her enlightenment and personal progress as well as those of two other characters’ (Helen and Hewet) and the narrative’s criticisms of London and its constructed places and customs help to show the potentially transgressive nature of a move away from the places of the imperial capital, and tentatively shows the possibility of progressive change and freedom on a personal level, although it is pessimistic in implying that such changes may symbolically kill the unprepared and unsupported subject.

Before its voyage across the Atlantic which helps its young heroine Rachel broaden her horizons and mind towards the critical issues of her society, the novel starts with another “voyage out” which takes Helen and Ridley Ambrose to poorer parts of London, thereby making them aware of the poverty and suffering experienced by lower order citizens. It takes them from the affluence of the West End to “plunge” them into the poverty of the east of London, which, as Thacker claims, portrays the novel’s first “voyage out” into something less known (420). In this respect, Thacker

155 looks into Virginia Woolf’s use of the word “plunge” in both her fiction and non- fiction, claiming that it “seems to be a favourite term for Woolf, being used over 200 times in her collected fiction, non-fiction, essays, diaries, and letters” (420). He focuses on Woolf’s repeated use of the term in Mrs Dalloway, particularly in its initial pages where the word is used to describe the streets of any place (such as Bourton or London) as spaces one could plunge into, and in her diaries and letters in which Woolf states that she often plunges into London to revive her spirit and mind. Thacker concludes that for Woolf “to ‘take the plunge’ is thus to embark on an adventure into something resembling unknown territory, whether that of a material space or of some imagined geography, perhaps recalling her early admiration of Hakluyt and other Elizabethan travel writers” (420). Whether it is intended to prepare the reader for an adventure into the unknown or not, such a start clearly illustrates how Woolf utilized space and geography as significant structural components of her fiction starting from her debut novel. With the Ambroses’ London trip the narrative briefly but effectively touches upon the issues of gender, class and nationalism that are woven into the spatialization of the city, and that maintain the dominant power hierarchies of the society. Larsson explains the importance of the different districts of London in Woolf’s fiction:

In Woolf’s novels it is always important to know where in London the various parts of the story take place, and in this scene from the beginning of The Voyage Out she draws an indelible line running north to south that divides the London map of her fiction into two parts: the affluent west, which she herself came from and which is the point of departure for most of the main characters in her fictional world; and the poverty stricken East End, which is almost depicted as a dark hole that the characters in her fiction only penetrate out of necessity or compassion. In between lies the centre of London with its grand shopping street, the Strand, Fleet Street, home of journalism, and the newly constructed Victoria Embankment. This is where people of various sorts will meet, lose their composure, abandon their old habits, taste freedom and think new thoughts. (18)

In this first novel, though, Woolf chooses to take her protagonist out of England in order for her to realize her dreams of more freedom, new thoughts and the dismissal of the old ideas and habits of her society.

156 While Ridley Ambrose walks from the Strand to the Embankment at the beginning of The Voyage Out, portrayed as beating the air with one arm and with his wife on the other, with a crowd of “small, agitated” clerks before them and “young lady typists” behind (1), the novel draws attention to the network of culture, class, gender and power which will be dealt with throughout the narrative. Commencing the novel with an implied warning of difficulties for those who want to pursue individualism, the narrative states, “In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand” (1). Following this hint, the narrative gradually shifts attention to the conflict between social classes by explaining the reasons why the upper-middle-class Ambroses are the focus of angry glances:

The small, agitated figures—for in comparison with this couple most people looked small—decorated with fountain pens, and burdened with despatch- boxes, had appointments to keep, and drew a weekly salary, so that there was some reason for the unfriendly stare which was bestowed upon Mr. Ambrose’s height and upon Mrs. Ambrose’s cloak. (1)

Helen reacts to these glances “by scorning all she met”, but the narrative states that “the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful” (2), which is immediately linked to gender: to the pain of being a mother, for she is about to leave her children behind in order to accompany her husband on a journey of convalescence, which seems not to be her decision judging from her refusal to walk arm in arm with her husband and to be soothed by him: “When they were safe on the further side, she gently withdrew her arm from his, allowing her mouth at the same time to relax, to tremble; then tears rolled down, and leaning her elbows on the balustrade . . . Mr. Ambrose attempted consolation; he patted her shoulder; but she showed no signs of admitting him . . .” (2). Helen becomes conscious of “the world she lived in” (4) and realizes the people passing by, the workers, the rich, and “the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant. Already, though there was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and women were nodding off to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton

157 beneath” (4). Employing the striking image of a “skeleton” for the background of poverty, suffering and alienation for the less privileged members of the society, the narrative urges the reader to see through the skin of civilisation.

As the Ambroses leave the West End and come closer to the Embankment, the place appears as “a great manufacturing place, where the people were engaged in making things as though the West End, with its electric lamps, its vast plate-glass windows all shining yellow . . . was the finished work,” (4-5) and Helen becomes increasingly aware of the social class of the inhabitants of the area: there one can find no other “hansom cabs” but commercial vehicles such as vans and waggons, and not one of the “thousand men and women she saw was either a gentleman or a lady” (5). After pointing to this understanding of interdependence of different spaces of society (an idea explored by Lefebvre and discussed in relation to this part of the novel in Chapter Three), the narrative satirizes Helen’s little interest in and engagement with lower classes of society by utilizing a striking geographical image of her circumscribed socio-spatial life. Startled by her discovery that “after all it is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of innumerable poor people,” Helen then imagines “herself pacing a circle all the days of her life round Piccadilly Circus” (5). As the image of a circle suggests, geographically and spatially divorced from the “innumerable poor” elsewhere in the city, in another so-called circle, the Ambroses are located within established socio-spatial structures of power and privilege. In addition to such an implication, critics such as David Bradshaw focus their attention on “Piccadilly Circus”, an area of London which had long been associated with prostitution by a number of scholars such as Henry Mayhew who

refers to ‘the circulating harlotry of the Haymarket and Regent Street’ (both of which feed into Piccadilly Circus), and Charles Booth, another famous chronicler of London’s ‘Submerged Tenth’ [n.7: Mayhew, 213 & Booth,

158 86]13 . . . the supposed fraction of the population living permanently in poverty (126).

Investigating the novel for its references to Piccadilly Circus and its prostitutes, Bradshaw rightfully claims that these references are so frequent that “the narrative seems locked into a kind of ‘circulating’ orbit around them”, (126) which is also in parallel with the novel’s several examples of middle- or upper-middle-class women turning around in circles and being confined to circular environments such as the papers flying in circles just before Richard Dalloway kisses Rachel (77), the circle of female hens Hewet and Hirst talk about (117), and ladies physically circling in vague fashion in the hotel in Santa Marina (120). Describing women characters moving in these spatially circular ways and alluding to Piccadilly Circus and its prostitutes, the narrative might be implying the skeleton of prostitution placed just beneath the skin of upper class society, while simultaneously highlighting the situation of all English women encircled by the oppressive system of patriarchy in their limited lot.

Absent from this opening walk taken by the Ambroses, the young protagonist Rachel makes her first appearance in the novel immediately after the description of this walk; she is portrayed as waiting for her uncle and aunt (Helen and Ridley Ambrose) nervously, “down in the saloon of her father’s ship”, Euphrosyne (6). The name of the ship is significant, as Yılmaz thinks, for it implies change and transformation, St Euphrosyne having adopted cross-dressing to escape marriage (95). As a disguise in sex suggests, Euphrosyne’s appearance in The Voyage Out also demonstrates uncertainty, ambiguity and instability, which can be seen in people’s mistaking the ship for a cargo boat carrying cattle (92), their inability to see the passengers on board as human beings (Mr Pepper, for instance, is mistaken for a cormorant or a cow) (92), or the blurred images of places or things of London (the image of The

13 Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, vol. iv, New York: Dover, 1968. Booth, Charles. Life and Labour of the People in London, vol. i, London: Macmillan, 1902.

159 Coliseum indistinguishable from the image of Queen Alexandra playing with her Spaniels (12)) through the windows of the ship. Yılmaz also draws attention to the fact that Euphrosyne was the Greek Goddess of Joy and Mirth, which also suits the examination of the life on the boat according to the carnival sense of the world, for the characters on the ship, particularly at the beginning of their voyage, embrace change with joy (95). Considering these implications of the name of the ship, its ambiguous and strange characteristics described, and the joyous feelings uttered by the characters regarding their voyage out of London, it can be claimed that the movement away from the solid land of London towards the fluctuating and unknown space of the sea is the action for escaping stability and heading for change, particularly for Rachel. Rachel’s placement on this ship can be considered the novel’s attempt to create an alternative space to the long-established and restrictive female domestic space that is constructed as a place of certainty, security and stability by patriarchy in London.

Once the Ambroses board on the ship and the ship sets sail, the previous intense urban picture of the energy, movement, smell and sound contrasts with the perception of the city held by the people on board. The fixed location of the city on land compares negatively to the movement of the ship on a seemingly infinite space of the sea, echoing Tuan’s suggestion of undifferentiated space as a symbol of freedom and action (54): “It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred” (10-11). The image of London as a “circumscribed mound” in these lines strengthens the sense of dreadful confinement of women, the poor and the marginalized other in London, which at the same time invokes the image of “the skeleton” beneath once again. The narrative makes clear that characters watching the gradual disappearance of the city believe that they are escaping imprisonment:

The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned. One figured them first

160 swarming about like aimless ants, and almost pressing each other over the edge; and then, as the ship withdrew, one figured them making a vain clamour, which, being unheard, either ceased, or rose into a brawl. Finally, when the ship was out of sight of land, it became plain that the people of England were completely mute. (27)

As the whole country transforms into a small shrinking island of people who are imprisoned and blown from one place to another aimlessly, passengers of the ship get filled with a sudden feeling of “exhilaration at their freedom”, (22) liberating themselves from the oppression of stability and certainty: “the ship was out in a wide space of sea very fresh and clear though pale in the early light. They had left London sitting on its mud . . . They were free of roads, free of mankind” (22). Being free of roads in these lines lends itself to two different readings if analysed through Tuan’s ideas of an undifferentiated space (6) which is both a positive symbol of freedom and change, and a negative sign of being exposed to threat. While being free of roads can be read as a temporary dismissal of physical space and of spatial practices in London which is suggested by Tuan’s idea of an undifferentiated space as a symbol of liberation from restraint, it can also be viewed as a threat, in that the voyage is to an unknown territory, which is later echoed in representations of the colonised natives and of the vast South American landscape as hostile.

The feeling of freedom characters experience is later reinforced by the sense of the collapse of geographical landmarks, illustrated by the picture of shrinking continents: “Europe shrank, Asia shrank, Africa and America shrank, until it seemed doubtful whether the ship would ever run against any of those wrinkled little rocks again” (27). Following these lines, the narrative points to the loneliness and isolation of the ship away from civilization, which needs further analysis: “She was more lonely than the caravan crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious, moving by her own power and sustained by her own resources” (27). Euphrosyne’s description here as moving by her own power and resources recalls Michel Foucault’s idea of the ship as “heterotopia par excellence”, “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea” (“Of Other Spaces” 27). Foucault

161 elaborates on the concept of heterotopia as cultural and discursive spaces that are disturbing, transforming, incompatible and contradictory— and therefore, the other. Being worlds within worlds, heterotopias reflect and at the same time contradict and disturb what is outside. In this respect, Woolf’s description of the ship is in line with Foucault’s description of a heterotopia, especially considering the fact that the narrative portrays the characters on board as feeling totally cut off from the rest of the world and its domineering social systems and regulations, and considering that the novel as a whole, like the sea journey, conveys a voyage of progressive transformation (though upsetting for dominant social systems) particularly for its young heroine Rachel.

As claimed in Chapter Three, even though the characters are filled with a sense of freedom from the constraints and regulations of London, they soon reproduce on board the same social system they had in London, as clearly seen in the stereotypical mistress-servant relationship between Rachel and Mrs Chailey (Mrs Chailey being given a low-quality cabin on the ship, complaining about it and Rachel’s getting angry over the fact that a servant wants a room she has no right to). Their London social system is also reflected in the different spheres they occupy within in the same physical place, which brings us to Tuan’s idea that an unknown space, in this case the ship, turns into a place when individuals attach meanings to it, and in most of the cases these are meanings that are imposed by the dominant ideologies of their society (34). This class-based relationship between Rachel and Mrs Chailey can also be witnessed among other characters, the most representative cases of which are rendered through the Dalloway couple. For instance, before meeting Helen, whom Willoughby mentions as the wife of the scholar Ridley, Clarissa becomes anxious as she thinks that “scholars married any one—girls they met in farms on reading parties; or little suburban women who said disagreeably, ‘Of course I know it’s my husband you want; not me’” (38). However, when Helen appears, “Mrs. Dalloway saw with relief that though slightly eccentric in appearance, she was not untidy, held herself well, and her voice had restraint in it, which she held to be the sign of a lady” (38). In another example, when the characters go to their rooms after dinner, Richard,

162 referring to Helen and her behaviour, asks Clarissa “Why is it that the women, in that class, are so much queerer than the men?” (48). It is later again Richard who hints at their class-conscious attitude and its necessity to maintain the “vast machine” (67) of English society in which all its members occupy a different fixed space engaging in specified sets of activities, all of which contribute to the functioning of the system. As seen from these examples, bearing in mind the physical and mental construction of London class-related space, characters build their social space and relations on the ship in line with them, reflecting patterns of behaviour and power relations characteristic of their life ashore.

Gender relations on board are equally reminiscent of domestic intercourse, which can be witnessed in several scenes in the opening chapters of the novel. “Chapter 1” of the novel repeatedly refers to various gender and class expectations addressed to ladies such as Helen Ambrose and Rachel Vinrace. For instance, the narrative reflects on the training ladies receive “after the fashion of their sex” (10) in promoting men’s talk without listening to it, while Rachel feels nervous thinking that “as her father’s daughter, she must be in some sort prepared to entertain” (6-7) the Ambroses. In another scene, she remembers a warning from her Aunt Bessie not to practice the piano too much, for fear of developing arm muscles that will put an end to her chances of marrying (13). In a striking scene that shows these gender expectations and discriminations spatially, and that resembles a later after-dinner scene on the ship, Helen and Rachel, observing Mr Ambrose and Mr Pepper smoking cigars in the living-room “oblivious of all tumult” (11) as if they were back in 1875 Cambridge, cannot find space for themselves and are left with the only option of sitting in the transitional or liminal space of a landing. Implication of this scene is also strengthened by the one in which Helen is shown setting up her and her husband’s cabin so as to meet her scholar husband’s requirements for comfort while he was “pacing up and down, his forehead all wrinkled” (25):

“You know what gentlemen are. The chairs too high—the tables too low— there’s six inches between the floor and the door. What I want’s a hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing as a kitchen table . . . “Move! Move!

163 Move!” cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner with a chair as though he were an errant hen. “Out of the way, Ridley, and in half an hour you’ll find it ready.”

Helen’s arrangement of the room to make her husband feel comfortable echoes Bachelard’s idea of a comforting, safe and harmonious home as constructed by “the housewife” who “awakens furniture” by constant polishing and neat arrangement (68). Assigned such duties and expectations, as Wheare points out, women in the novel are shown acting as “satellites of the men with whom they are linked” (18) whether at home in London or in the space of a ship venturing into an unknown land.

Such a portrayal of gender relations finds its best expression in Rachel’s treatment of and by her father. In fact, right from the start the narrative shows Rachel’s voyage to be lacking the characteristics of a self-initiated or quest-like voyage, in presenting her as an object of travel conveyed to South America by her father. One of the ways the narrative implies this is by not giving Rachel the central position in the departure scene; such a position in departure scenes Stout claims (2) is a significant trope in women’s narratives of travel, and is regarded as representing the woman getting rid of prescribed gender roles. Rachel, in contrast, makes her first appearance passively and nervously awaiting the Ambroses in the saloon of her father’s ship. Moreover, her father, when introducing the passengers on the ship to each other, does not include Rachel’s name in his list: “my brother-in-law, Ambrose, the scholar (I daresay you’ve heard his name), his wife, my old friend Pepper, a very quiet fellow . . . And that’s all” (38), which may suggest her insignificance to him, and certainly suggests her social insignificance in that gathering, as well as marking her presence as a kind of absence. Even his allowing Rachel to stay with the Ambroses in Santa Marina is closely entwined with his own political ambitions, for he desires a career in Parliament, in which a more socially adept Rachel (who will be turned into a socially improved hostess with Helen’s help) “could be of great help” (91). As seen, the narrative skilfully contrasts what Rachel achieves through her voyage (that takes her out of the domestic rooms of patriarchy to new realms of experience) with what

164 her voyage means to her father: a voyage that will render her even more conformable to patriarchal models of femininity.

Reading The Voyage Out as a story of female initiation, Froula asserts that Woolf “endows Rachel with a powerful desire to evade or transcend this culturally determined destiny; in other words, to break out of the female initiation plot that her culture imposes upon women” (16). However, Rachel seems to lack this desire in the early chapters of the novel, as can be seen from Helen’s descriptions of her (on the first evening on board the Euphrosyne), as a very compliant daughter: “weak”, “vacillating” and “emotional” (13-14). Looking at Rachel, Helen compares her to women of her age, which conveys her criticism of women not registering as individuals: “Women of her own age usually boring her . . . when you said something to her it would make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon the water. Here was nothing to take hold of in girls – nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory” (13). From the very beginning of the narrative, Helen serves as the most direct spokesperson for gender issues, even though she generally behaves conventionally, as observed in her catering to her husband’s needs and desires, as Hewet openly remarks: “she who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband” (273). She seems particularly engaged in a subtle but unrelenting undermining of dominantly patriarchal institutions and actions that exclude or suppress women such as religion, the army or trade, which can be observed in her instructing her children to think of God as a kind of walrus, not wanting her servant to teach them to pray (21), despising war as “it seemed to her as wrong to keep sailors as to keep a zoo” (70), and claiming that making a fortune in trade as Mr Thornbury does is twice as bad as pursuing the role of a prostitute when she learns that Mr Thornbury and Mr Elliot forced a woman (Signora Lola Mendoza) to leave the hotel, upon which nobody questioned “the truth of the story, or … asked Thornbury and Elliot what business it was of theirs” with that woman (347).

165 In addition to gender and class, the ship’s so-called isolation and its freedom from the restricting nationalist and imperialist norms and regulations of London also turn out to be an illusion, particularly with the appearance of the Dalloways on the ship. Clarissa and Richard Dalloway are presented as the very incarnation of London with their pompous and conceited nationalism and upper-class background. The image of London that Richard and Clarissa cherish is definitely different from that of Helen’s “sedentary miser” in that, for them, it is a grand and radiant metropolis: “Think of the light burning over the House, Dick! When I stood on deck just now I seemed to see it. It is what one means by London” (49). Comparing what other nations have done in their colonies, Richard attempts to consolidate what the British have done and achieved by saying, “I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men, their records cleaner” (64). In the same vein, Clarissa emphasizes and boasts of their being English on several occasions. For instance, while two British warships are sailing past the Euphrosyne, during which the passengers on the ship stand up on deck out of respect, Clarissa takes Rachel’s hand and joyously utters, “Aren’t you glad to be English!” (70). In this scene, though, the description of these two warships underscores a much darker reality than the idealisation of Clarissa:

She had sighted two sinister grey vessels, low in the water, and bald as bone, one closely following the other with the look of eyeless beasts seeking their prey . . . The warships drew past, casting a curious effect of discipline and sadness upon the waters, and it was not until they were again invisible that people spoke to each other naturally. (69-70)

That the warships leave “a curious effect of discipline and sadness upon the waters” as they draw past serves as an example of Lefebvre’s idea of how space is socially and ideologically inscribed (53) and Tuan’s idea of how the designed environment serves an educational and disciplining purpose (112). Constructed as the space of national power, discipline and ideals, these war ships are able to leave emotionally perceptible traces of their constructed characteristics on the vast space of the sea around them. Under the influence of these ships the characters during lunch “talk of valour and death”, quote poetry and extol the value of “life on board a man of war”, describe the sailors as quite nice and simple people, and talk about “the magnificent

166 qualities of British admirals” (70). However, the sinister look of the ships seeking their prey evokes a less glorious image of the British Empire, in spite of Richard and Clarissa’s support so far. This description of the ship strikingly anticipates the novel’s later description of the first Elizabethan sailors to arrive on South American soil as “fangs greedy for flesh” (94), and both these images of the British navy and its forebears suggest “the predatory nature of imperialism . . . and, from Rachel’s point of view, male sexuality” as Peach claims (53–4). In this respect, Helen Ambrose remains the only dissenting voice in the lunch scene, pointing to the inhumanity of imperialism and mindless nationalism: “This being so, no one liked it when Helen remarked that it seemed to her as wrong to keep sailors as to keep a Zoo, and that as for dying on a battle-field, surely it was time we ceased to praise courage” (70).

Before moving on to examining how public space is constructed and how characters perceive and experience it in Santa Marina, it is important to focus on Richard Dalloway, who in his sincere desire “to consolidate” the achievements of the British Empire and maintain the stability of the political system governed by men by denying women the right to vote, serves as the perfect embodiment of the close relation between imperialism and patriarchy and its threat to women. Through this character, as Johnson remarks, and particularly through Rachel’s shipboard conversations with him, “Woolf shows how the British man’s prerogative to colonize the world and to carve up geographical boundaries stems from his creation of concomitant domestic boundaries based on career, class, and educational boundaries at home” (69). Looking for companionship on the deck of Euphrosyne, Rachel engages in a conversation with Richard, stating that she knows nothing (65) and wants to be enlightened about his ideal. For Richard, however, it seems that Rachel’s confessed ignorance is desirable as a way of maintaining the status quo, as he approvingly comments: “It’s far better that you should know nothing” (65). Following this, unsurprisingly, he continues to talk about the importance of the separation of the public and private spheres, according to which a man should be able to revitalise himself at home and find comfort in the fact that his wife “has spent

167 her day in calling, music, playing with the children, [sic] domestic duties” (66). Although he presents his keeping of his wife away from politics as a way of preserving her from disillusionment, his seemingly good intention recalls his explicit desire to deny the vote to women. Similarly, he finds it wise to keep girls ignorant of male practices and sexual desire: “Girls are kept very ignorant, aren’t they? Perhaps it’s wise – perhaps – You don’t know?” (69). It is precisely this ignorance that makes Rachel exposed to his assault, which suggests that her protected upbringing acts as a male-engineered trap rather than as a means of protection.

After the discussion of politics, Rachel and Richard again run into each other near her cabin, during a storm. Delivering a rhapsody of how splendid the modern world is and questioning why human beings are endowed with only one life to live, Richard asks about Rachel’s plans for her life, to which Rachel strikingly answers, “You see, I’m a woman” (78), acknowledging that she has fewer choices in life than men. Richard replies to this by saying that she has inestimable power – for good or for evil” (78) as she is a beautiful woman. It is just at this moment that the ship suddenly lurches and Richard kisses Rachel passionately, following which he utters in terror (terror that any woman could exert power over his self-control, perhaps): “‘You tempt me,’ . . . Rachel stood up and went. Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the physical pain of the emotion was so great that she could only keep herself moving above the great leaps of her heart” (78). As Zink claims, the sexual threat Richard poses to Rachel, realized in his uninvited kiss, is closely related to his status as a member of the patriarchal machine seeking conquest and mastery (64). His assault on her also raises the question of what constitutes a safe space for women, which is an issue that can also be linked with women’s education, described as unstructured and inadequate, and carried out in domestic space. The novel’s unwavering depictions of Rachel’s education from different interior sites such as the aunts’ Richmond house and her cabin “where she would sit for hours playing very difficult music, reading a little German or a little English when the mood took her” (28) and her ignorance upon some realities of life question the adequacy of the education

168 offered to women in interior places. Later in the novel, Helen more explicitly and daringly raises the question of women’s education and expresses her criticism:

The present method seems to me abominable. This girl, though twenty-four, had never heard that men desired women, and, until I explained it, did not know how children were born. Her ignorance upon other matters [sic] as important . . . It seems to me not merely foolish but criminal to bring people up like that. Let alone the suffering to them, it explains why women are what they are – the wonder is they’re no worse. (103)

Although Rachel is portrayed as feeling exalted after Richard’s kiss, unable to understand its degrading implications due to her naivety, she has horrible nightmares that night. In her dream she walks down a long narrow tunnel in which

she could touch the damp bricks on either side. At length the tunnel opened and became a vault; she found herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her wherever she turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and like the face of an animal. (79)

She then feels she needs to lock her cabin door, for she feels as if she were pursued by a moaning voice and desiring eyes: “All night long barbarian men harassed the ship; they came scuffling down the passages, and stopped to snuffle at her door” (80). These images of dark subterranean spaces in which Rachel feels trapped sharply contrast with the expansive movement of the ship on the vast space of the sea, and later with spacious landscape of South America, adding to the novel’s oscillations between themes and scenes of freedom (promised through going away from London) and those of entrapment (experienced in London).

Once the characters land in Santa Marina, escaping the confines of the boat, Rachel and Helen begin to explore the ideals of change and freedom implied by their “voyage out” from the convention-bound London life they are used to. They adopt a critical stance towards their ways of living in London. Within a few days of arrival, Helen is comparing this new place of “flowering trees . . . amazing colours of sea and earth” to England where there is no such variety of colours (102). The narrative describes her tone of voice as “condescending” towards “that poor island” that is

169 now far away and that is “now advancing chilly crocuses and nipped violets in nooks, in copses, in cosy corners, tended by rosy old gardeners in mufflers, who were always touching their hats and bobbing obsequiously” (102). In a moment of anger she turns her attention to other British visitors who are engaged in rumours of London over “a General Election” that “had reached them even out here” (102). Woolf’s perspective on the spread of news beyond national borders in Santa Marina is a vision or observation that is presented again, many years later, in The Years, where news of Parnell’s death spreads rapidly and powerfully in London, once more demonstrating the unbreakable connection of all spaces, as suggested by Lefebvre. Questioning the importance those visitors attach to “whether Asquith is in or Austen Chamberlin out”, she criticizes the whole system of politics, and the ignorant and snobbish attitudes of people in England regarding social inequalities arising from the class-stratified system, while praising what she has observed of the social system in Santa Marina: “When have you ever encouraged a living artist? Or bought his best work? Why are you all so ugly and so servile? Here the servants are human beings. They talk to one as if they were equals. As far as I can tell there are no aristocrats” (102).

Three months pass after the Ambroses and Rachel land on Santa Marina and the narrative starts pointing out the changes that particularly happen in Rachel’s attitude and life, presenting her present state of mental alertness as a significant improvement on her ignorant, passive and submissive past state, and using a depiction of improved physical health to illustrate it: “a keen observer might have thought that the girl was more definite and self-confident in her manner than before. Her skin was brown, her eyes certainly brighter, and she attended to what was said as though she might be going to contradict it” (104). In these three months Rachel and Helen have spent a considerable amount of time outside, “seeing life” (105) as they call it, habitually wandering through the city after dark. What they observe in these excursions are the local people in Santa Marina leading their lives mostly outside. “The young women” whom they see during their walk “sat on the doorsteps, or issued out on to balconies, while the young men ranged up and down beneath, shouting up a greeting from time

170 to time and stopping here and there to enter into amorous talk” (105). The life of the inside seems to flow outside as seen in matters of flirtations losing their intimate nature and becoming public. Money affairs lose privacy, too, and are evident to everybody: “At the open windows merchants could be seen making up the day’s account” (105). The streets are portrayed as being “full of people” who “interchanged their views of the world as they walked, or gathered round the wine- tables at the street corner” (106). The narrative ironically adds here that even though Rachel and Helen, being English, arouse some curiosity among this crowd, no has “molested” them (106), which strikingly contrasts with earlier descriptions of the people of Santa Marina by English people (before they have disembarked), which claim that these people are “naked” (28) and “passionate” savages (95). Apparently, life in Santa Marina takes place in front of everybody, which is in contrast with the life in England spatially divided into private and public and thereby also maintaining boundaries between women, men, the poor, the rich, “normal” ordinary citizens and the marginalized. In the literally more open society of Santa Marina Rachel and Helen are able to suspend their English confinement and enjoy the freedom offered by their new life. Helen in particular engages in comparing this new spatial experience and way of living with England, and approvingly remarks that people of Santa Marina in their shabby clothes look very natural and comfortable with themselves. She then envisions that this very night there might be a Court in England with a crowd of people waiting in the cold to watch the carriages passing by, “men selling picture postcards . . . wretched little shop-girls with round bandboxes; . . . bank clerks in tail coats” (106), and a great many aristocrats displaying the number of footmen they are allowed to possess in line with the status of their social class. She resembles the people of London to “the kings and queens, knights and pawns of the chessboard” (106), able to move only around their restricted lot and only in specified ways, and acting out their lives in the ways that are assigned to them.

The walks taken by Rachel and Helen reveal great differences between life in Santa Marina and life in faraway London. It is perhaps the fact that the inside of the homes in Santa Marina are frequently portrayed as seen through uncurtained windows,

171 which poses a great challenge to the sharply drawn distinction between the private and public space in England. By making domestic space visible from the outside in several scenes that take place in Santa Marina, and merging the inside with outside, the novel subverts the patriarchal construction of domestic space as a predominantly private and feminized space, through a Bakhtinian carnivalization. This aspect of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque is exemplified in Dostoevsky’s “leaping over all that is comfortably habitable, well-arranged and stable, all that is far from the threshold” (Yilmaz 108). Even though the text does not explicitly state that her new habit is influenced by what she sees around her, Helen orders that the dining-room windows in her Santa Marina villa “are left uncurtained” (98). Growing increasingly used to the life of this new place, Rachel and Helen seem comfortable looking through the uncurtained windows of the hotel where other characters are staying, observing one of the centres of action in the novel: “A row of long windows opened almost to the ground. They were all of them uncurtained and all brilliantly lighted, so that they could see everything inside. Each window revealed a different section of the life of the hotel” (107). It is observed that when they come to the gates of the hotel, Rachel, who was previously portrayed as a girl of reluctance to speak or act (13), does not hesitate to enter: “Rachel gave the gate a push; it swung open, and, seeing no one about and judging that nothing was private in this country, they walked straight on” (107). Recognizing, or perhaps wishing, that they should not be observed in their voyeurism, they draw into the shadow of a column and watch the dining room being swept, a waiter eating grapes with his leg across the corner of a table, white cooks cooking and washing in the kitchen, waiters going in and out, and ladies and gentlemen lying in deep armchairs, speaking or turning over the magazines in the drawing room (107). In this scene Rachel’s and Helen’s preoccupation with secretly gazing at people (mostly men) shows a reversal of the more common situation that feminist critics have discussed as the problem of women being objectified by the male gaze (Rabinowitz 195). In frequently drawing attention to the fact that women have served as mirrors reflecting the figures of men as bigger and more important than their real presences (an insight shared by Hewet in this novel, when he

172 associates horses with women in seeing men “three times as big as” they are (233)), Woolf’s fictional works point to construction of women as objects of men’s gaze. In this first novel, however, with two women gazing inside the places; homes, rooms and so-called privacy of others, the female gaze is associated with the act of acquiring knowledge and seeing life as it is (including a glimpse of class differences that is not to the advantage of the wealthy).

These walks trigger interest in Rachel regarding different ways of living and her enlightenment on issues that she has previously been consciously kept ignorant of. They awaken her to different possibilities of living, particularly for women, as shown in her identifying her room at the Ambroses’ villa with “a fortress as well as a sanctuary” from which she can “defy the world” (133). In this room she can choose to become and preserve what she desires to be, away from the world of “the interminable walks round sheltered gardens” and “household gossip of her aunts” in London (134). She chooses her own books to read and thinks about life. After reading Ibsen’s A Doll House, for instance, she identifies essential questions as follows:

“What I want to know,” . . . “is this: What is the truth? What’s the truth of it all?” She was speaking partly as herself, and partly as the heroine of the play she had just read. The landscape outside, because she had seen nothing but print for the space of two hours, now appeared amazingly solid and clear, but although there were men on the hill washing the trunks of olive trees with a white liquid, for the moment she herself was the most vivid thing in it—a heroic statue in the middle of the foreground, dominating the view. Ibsen’s plays always left her in that condition. She acted them for days at a time, greatly to Helen’s amusement . . . (Her mind wandered away from Nora, but she went on thinking of things that the book suggested to her, of women and life.) (133-134)

In here we have depicted Rachel in a “space of two hours” in her room, a setting which echoes Tuan’s idea of an intimate connection between time and space and also Lefebvre’s ideas on social space as being alive, and being the center of passion, action and lived situations; thereby, immediately implying time (52). Within this

173 chronotope (Bakhtin 84)14, Rachel moves beyond conventional ideas about the world, through Ibsen’s art, and towards a perception of herself as the most lively and important (heroic) thing, in her view on the world (through her window, a liminal space), far more significant than the “men on the hill washing the trunks of olive trees.” This scene reflects Woolf’s ideas on the importance of having a room of one’s own, which, through its silence and privacy, can become a liberating place in which women can express themselves without any restrictions, and from which a variety of their experience can be spoken (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.5: 297).

Rachel’s conversations with Hewet also contribute to her becoming aware of women’s condition and acquiring a sense of protest against patriarchal dictates: “Hewet’s words made her think. She always submitted to her father” (239). Hewet’s criticism of the system of patriarchy is that it prevents women from achieving individuality by denying them equal opportunities in education and work life, and he expresses his critique in spatial terms, by listing the places and positions to which only men can aspire and access: “What a miracle the masculine conception of life is—judges, civil servants, army, navy, Houses of Parliament, lord mayors—what a world we’ve made of it!” (234) He exemplifies his claim with the case of his friend, Hirst (who frequently addresses degrading comments to women, in order to prove his so-called superiority and intelligence). Hirst exhausts him with his ceaseless selfish questions regarding “whether he’s to stay on at Cambridge or to go to the Bar” (234). He remarks he feels really sorry for Hirst’s mother and sister, who have most probably listened to Hirst on this issue at least five hundred times, and whose lives have been wasted for the sake of his advancement:

Can’t you imagine the family conclaves, and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St. John must have the school-room to himself—St. ‘John’s working,’ ‘St. John wants his tea brought to him.’ Don’t you know the kind of thing? No wonder that St. John thinks it a matter of considerable

14 Bakhtin defines chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” in which “[t]ime, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (84).

174 importance. . . He has to earn his living. But St. John’s sister—” Hewet puffed in silence. “No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the rabbits.” (234)

According to Hewet, women contribute to this unfair treatment by exaggerating the importance of men, which he illustrates through his striking association between horses and women, as previously explained, and he believes that nothing will improve women’s condition (including the right to vote), unless this mind-set, as well as the perceptions of society, changes. What he claims about women exaggerating men and their abilities was well exemplified by the narrative in an earlier scene when Clarissa mused over what Richard means to her: “I often wonder . . . “whether it is really good for a woman to live with a man who is morally her superior, as Richard is mine. It makes one so dependent. I suppose I feel for him what my mother and women of her generation felt for Christ” (49).

Through Hewet’s persistent questioning of her life with her aunts and father back in London, Rachel willingly reflects on her life at home even though she is angered by Hewet’s answer to her questioning why her life should interest him: for he replies “Partly because you’re a woman” (237). On hearing this she feels “at once singular and under observation, as she felt with St. John Hirst”, and she would have responded bitterly had Hewet not led her thoughts to a different direction. As seen in this scene as well as in her anger with Hirst after his degrading comments, Rachel’s experiences and relative freedom in Santa Marina seem to have allowed her to shed her passive, submissive and weak stance towards conventional constructions of her gender. In this respect, Hewet’s questioning her about her life back at home considerably contributes to her growth. Asked how she spends her day in London, she visualizes a day inevitably cut into four parts by family meals: “These divisions were absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that was what she saw. ‘Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight,’ she said” (234). She talks about the household chores assigned to her aunts (shopping, governing servants, hosting guests, writing letters, as well as cleaning and cooking, which Rachel claims that her aunts occasionally

175 did, for their servants “were always bad” (235)) and their other responsibilities (helping and tending the poor through charity work) without attaching importance to what they do or showing any sympathy for them. However, after Hewet’s fervent speech on how women efface themselves as individuals for the sake of others and how no one cares about these “curious silent unrepresented lives” (238), Rachel re- evaluates her aunts’ lives by viewing them from a new perspective. She realizes that her father, “good-humoured” but “contemptuous” towards them, was “a great dim force in the house by means of which they held on to the great world which is represented every morning in the Times” (239). Seeing that what Hewet says about women (their sacrificing themselves for others) holds true for her household, in which her father’s life is deemed more important than theirs, she questions whether she herself really believes this (239), and realizes that:

. . . it was her aunts who influenced her really; her aunts who built up the fine, closely woven substance of their life at home. They were less splendid but more natural than her father was. All her rages had been against them; it was their world with its four meals, its punctuality, and servants on the stairs at half-past ten, that she examined so closely and wanted so vehemently to smash to atoms.

Following these thoughts, she starts empathising with her aunts by appreciating what they are doing for others: their building things up, caring for people, helping others, all of which she conceives of as “grains of sand falling, falling through innumerable days, making an atmosphere and building up a solid mass, a background” (240). Understanding that all her rage directed at her aunts and their world is actually the result of a patriarchal system that has effaced women’s chances of developing individuality, Rachel starts to appreciate and even elevate what her aunts do over what her father does, by recognizing that their “grains of sand” form the solid “background” of their society, subverting the long-lasting binary oppositions of background and foreground; thereby making background a positive element.

In addition to opening her mind to issues of gender discrimination, Rachel also awakens to other significant problems that oppress individuals in her society. The disillusionment that she experiences when she accompanies the hotel guests to a

176 Sunday service and listens to the English clergyman, Mr Bax, makes her question her religious beliefs. Helen had previously made fun of these, opining that Rachel had never seriously questioned her own beliefs (pointing to Rachel’s general ignorance and unquestioning approach to other aspects of life, too) (157). Mr Bax’s sermon disgusts Rachel, for while it seemingly focuses on owing a duty to the natives of Santa Marina, its rhetoric and illustrative passages actually expose the insincerity of his expressed belief in the sameness, and equality, of human beings:

It rambled with a kind of amiable verbosity from one heading to another, suggesting that all human beings are very much the same under their skins . . . observing that very small things do influence people, particularly natives; in fact, a very dear friend of Mr. Bax’s had told him that the success of our rule in India, that vast country, largely depended upon the strict code of politeness which the English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark that small things were not necessarily small . . . The humblest could help; the least important things had an influence (. . . his remarks seemed to be directed to women, for indeed Mr. Bax’s congregations were mainly composed of women, and he was used to assigning them their duties in his innocent clerical campaigns) . . . (259)

As seen, the narrative ironically contrasts its previous description of the colonization of Santa Marina by “the hardy Englishmen . . . greedy for flesh, and fingers itching for gold” who “reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment” (94) with what Mr Bax calls a code of politeness which contributed to the “success” of the English in India. Moreover, Mr Bax’s speech continuously refers to “little” things, by which he hints at his real perception of the natives or women as less important constitutes of his society, revealing his claim of the sameness of human beings to be insincere. He concludes his speech in a way that reminds readers (and perhaps Rachel) of Richard Dalloway’s idea of a society as a machine in which every member can contribute to the functioning of the system no matter how small or inferior position they are given in it. Resembling each individual to a drop of water that “alters . . . not only the immediate spot in the ocean where it falls, but all the myriad drops which together compose the great universe of waters” (260), he wants the contribution of all members of the society, even that of “the humblest” to his call. Finding this verbal display of falsity horrible, Rachel wants to leave church

177 immediately, but is confronted by other suffocating English conventions that have been carried with her compatriots into the hotel.

In Santa Marina, the Ambroses’ villa and the hotel serve as the two centres for action. A close investigation into the narrative reveals that the hotel is the place where the conventions of “London” are still scrupulously upheld, which can be seen in guests’ reading the sole copy of The Times meticulously, discussing the state of the Empire, playing parlour games, drinking tea, rigorously regulating their eating to accord with the English system of meal times, gossiping about who might be interested in whom or which couple is suitable or not, and evaluating each other’s behaviour in line with English standards of etiquette. The novel’s depiction of a party in the hotel strikingly demonstrates how some hotel inhabitants are very much inclined to continue living their English ways. The party is organized to celebrate Susan’s and Arthur’s engagement, and in the party they beg Rachel to continue playing the piano when the musicians stop playing. When she starts playing, combining bits of music of different types, some guests complain, saying “that’s not a dance” (181):

“It is,” she replied . . . “Invent the steps.” . . . Helen caught the idea; seized Miss Allan by the arm, and whirled round the room, now curtseying, now spinning round, now tripping this way and that like a child skipping through a meadow. “This is the dance for people who don’t know how to dance!” she cried . . . St. John hopped with incredible swiftness . . . Hewet, swaying his arms and holding out the tails of his coat, swam down the room in imitation of the voluptuous dreamy dance of an Indian maiden dancing before her Rajah . . . Miss Allen advanced with skirts extended and bowed profoundly to the engaged pair. Once their feet fell in with the rhythm they showed a complete lack of self-consciousness . . . Some people were heard to criticise the performance as a romp; to others it was the most enjoyable part of the evening. (181-182)

This part of the novel can be explained through Tuan’s ideas on dance and music. According to Tuan, dance accompanied with music or some kind of a beat has the power of repealing the sense of historical time and oriented space (129): “Music and dance free people from the demands of purposeful goal-directed life, allowing them to live briefly in what Erwin Straus calls “presentic” unoriented space.” Even though there are some guests who fall in with the rhythm, lose self-consciousness and in the

178 course of dancing abandon at least some English conventions, the fact that there remain others who criticize Rachel’s unique blend of music or Helen’s love of dancing (finding it unsuitable for a woman of her age (174)) demonstrates the rigidity and unbending nature of London middle class society and its conventions. Nevertheless, considering Vorachek’s assertions that proper piano playing represented the ultimate respectability for middle class girls of the Victorian and post-Victorian era, which would help them attract husbands (26), and Mitchell’s understanding of parties or dances as the middle-class mating rituals for women in Victorian era (155), it can be claimed that in this scene Rachel is breaking more than musical or dancing conventions; she is really breaking gender expectations and even defying conventions of sexual behaviour (how to advertise herself as a suitable wife) with her unique blend of music.

For Hewet the hotel guests represent the British ruling class; though “ignoble” and “mediocre”, they are nevertheless “the people with money, and to them rather than to others was given the management of the world! Put among them some one more vital, who cared for life or for beauty, and what an agony” (146). This bears close affinities with how Rachel feels after her involuntary chats with some of these hotel guests after the sermon:

“It’s intolerable!” . . . It had been miserable from start to finish; first, the service in the chapel; then luncheon; then Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs. Paley blocking up the passage. All day long she had been tantalized and put off. She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true proportions. She disliked the look of it immensely—churches, politicians, misfits, and huge impostures—men like Mr. Dalloway, men like Mr. Bax, Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley blocking up the passage . . . For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world, which tried to burst forth here— there—and was repressed now by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity, the weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would twist her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid. (290)

Rachel for a moment acknowledges that her body is the source of all life for her, and that the weight of the entire world as it is made up of the religious ideology

179 represented by Mr Bax, the political power represented by Mr Dalloway, the abusive sexual system represented by Mr Dalloway and by Evelyn (who has just told Rachel about a sexual assault she experienced), and the complicit mothers and aunts represented by Mrs Paley, aims at repressing her body and life. Realizing that thinking is no escape, she believes “Physical movement was the only refuge, in and out of rooms, in and out of people’s minds” (291). The association Rachel makes between rooms, and human minds and bodies, is made several times in the novel, perhaps influenced by the idea of proliferation of spaces such as visual space, bodily space, motor space that appeared in modernism. For instance, for Rachel and Helen, who gaze in the hotel secretly, the narrative says, “each window revealed a different section of the life of the hotel” (107), depending on the people who occupied it. In another scene the narrative points out that the rooms are “as like in shape as one egg- box is like another,” but what makes a room different from another is the human being contained in it (112). Later, when Rachel involuntarily pays brief visits to a few hotel inhabitants’ rooms, the narrative dwells on different possessions that each inhabitant possesses in these rooms (285), pointing to how these objects change the rooms and reflect their inhabitants’ individuality, which can be regarded as the painter Walter Sickert’s influence –particularly his portrayal of human beings in relation to the places they occupy and objects they possess in these places- (as mentioned in the first chapter of this study) on Woolf’s work. In the earlier phases of Rachel’s illness, also, the narrative presents her room as functioning like a screen for her condition standing metaphorically for her body: the room being “painfully white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat” (369), later expressing her hallucinations by having “the odd power of expanding” and enabling her to “see through the wall in front of her” (390). This association echoes Lefebvre’s idea of the body as a space itself, and his understanding of mutual dependence of and interaction between the human body constituting its own space and spatial rules to live, and the cultural space of the society that also regulates the rules of living for the human body:

180 each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space. This is a truly remarkable relationship: the body with the energies at its disposal, the living body, creates or produces its own space; conversely, the laws of space, which is to say the laws of discrimination in space, also govern the living body and deployment of its energies (170).

Therefore, it can be maintained that serving as a cultural living space for the English travellers, the hotel rooms house its guests’ cultural rituals and conventions as well as their psychic interiority and possessions, which yields an understanding of space that is dynamic, changeable and heterogeneous as proposed by Lefebvre.

Rachel’s awakening to the grim realities of her society, and her personal development as a result of her enlightenment reach an ultimate point with the two group trips to the top of Monte Rosa and to the natives’ village in Santa Marina. These trips function as important tools in the novel in that they link the novel back to its portrayal and critique of colonialism and imperialism. As Peach suggests, they are analogous to the trip taken by the Ambroses in the first chapter of the novel from the West End to the East End of London. It will be remembered that their trip indicated how the East End serves as the industrial center of London to create and maintain the life of the West End. Likewise, these trips in Santa Marina make the relationship between the center of the Empire and its far-away colonies apparent: a relationship mainly based on economic interests benefitting the Empire (Peach 49): “Slipping across the water, the English sailors bore away bars of silver, bales of linen, timbers of cedar wood, golden crucifixes knobbed with emeralds” (The Voyage Out 94). As claimed in the previous chapter, such a relationship drawn between different parts of London as well as between England and Santa Marina hints at the interconnectedness of different spaces and refutes the idealization of one as absolute, enduring, self-sustaining and homogeneous.

As a child of late Victorian England who was exposed to a culture dominated by the British Empire, and to the culture of an intellectual milieu that discussed the aims and failures of overseas colonialism, Woolf was inevitably attracted by imperial subjects, contexts, and ideas. Considering this, anti-imperialism in Woolf’s fictional

181 works has already been examined and discussed by a number of critics such as Jane Marcus and Kathy J. Phillips, who in “Britannia Rules The Waves” (1992) and Virginia Woolf Against Empire (1994) respectively, point to the critique of the Empire in Woolf’s fictional works. Both of them treat her works as powerful social satire which particularly aims to criticise imperialist society, emphasizing the link between her criticisms of imperialism and gender at the same time. They react against Woolf’s common portrayal as a “naïve”, untutored modernist, obsessed by interior, subjective and mystical experience” as in Jane Goldman’s words (39). While Marcus claims that Woolf’s fiction “relentlessly connects imperialism to patriarchy” (141), Phillips, in a similar vein, remarks that Woolf insistently associates “Empire-making, war-making and gender relations” (7). According to Phillips, even in her earliest works Woolf suggests the inseparable connection between English gender codes and overseas colonization, and she reveals this interdependence in her fictional works by demonstrating the ways in which English culture “idealize[d] a delicate and threatened womanhood, needing strong defence by chivalric warriors” (144), which led to “men’s training to expect women’s inferiority” and which then prepared women to accept other hierarchies such as imperialism (225-228). In this respect, Midgley, focusing her attention on The Voyage Out, draws attention to the novel’s utilizing metaphors about gender to explore issues of imperialism, involving “descriptions of colonial exploration and conquest as the penetration of virgin lands” and “feminized representations of colonized men” (2). The most striking example of such associations is found in the part where Santa Marina is described as “a virgin land behind a veil. Here a settlement was made; women were imported; children grew. All seemed to favor the expansion of the British Empire” (94). Conceptualizing this new land as a “virgin land”, the narrative links it to young Rachel, mirroring a similar kind of oppression and exploitation that she experiences under the patriarchal system of her society. Other critics, on the other hand, focus their attention on Woolf’s ambiguous treatment of imperialism. For instance, analysing Woolf’s work, James F. Wurtz claims to have found a “profound ambivalence over the role that empire plays in both

182 limiting and making possible her modernist art” (95). He observes that “the difficulty with postcolonial analyses of Woolf lies in her work’s simultaneous critique of and concession to empire”, which “anticipates Homi Bhabha’s warning that ambivalence in and of itself is not constitutively subversive” (97-98). Considering what these critics say about Woolf’s fictional works regarding imperialism, it can be claimed that Woolf, in The Voyage Out, makes use of a sea voyage to a fictional South American country to expose and critique the patriarchal and imperial ideologies of English society even though she does not offer or actualize an alternative way of living in London (particularly by making Rachel die towards the end of the novel), and the novel shows how these two systems are interrelated, by making its young protagonist Rachel acknowledge the implications of such interdependence.

The first of the two excursions in Santa Marina is the one to the top of Monte Rosa, which arouses feelings of bewilderment and fear in the tourists:

One after another they came out on the flat space at the top and stood overcome with wonder. Before them they beheld an immense space—grey sands running into forest, and forest merging in mountains, and mountains washed by air, the infinite distances of South America . . . The effect of so much space was at first rather chilling. They felt themselves very small . . . (143)

The characters are shown to be experiencing the two contradictory feelings of freedom and threat that Tuan (54) identifies as human responses to some wild spaces. Even though they stand in ‘wonder’ at the vast open space of Santa Marina, they feel afraid at the same time, perhaps experiencing the feelings of exposure, threat and vulnerability that Tuan associates with encounters with open space that has never been occupied and endowed with a human meaning (54). Following this exposure to an immense landscape, the characters start talking about unusual things such as the “little looking-glasses in hansoms” they see around, and turn the topic to England with its “four-wheeled cabs” and aeroplanes (144-145), which behaviour might stem from their need to feel secure in this unknown land. They soon start “to name the places beneath them and to hang upon them stores of information about navies and armies, political parties, natives and mineral products—all of which combined, they

183 said, to prove that South America was the country of the future” (148), which shows their inclination to construct this place in line with England and their imperialism. Considering the fact that these characters have been shown to anchor their lives and senses of identity in the stability of their nation whenever they come across an unknown territory or thing, Tuan’s explanation of such behaviour with reference to the maternal role of places is significant:

Mother may well be the first enduring and independent object in the infant’s world of fleeting impressions. Later she is recognized by the child as his essential shelter and dependable source of physical and psychological comfort. A man leaves his home or hometown to explore the world; a toddler leaves his mother’s side to explore the world. Places stay put. Their image is one of stability and permanence. (Tuan 29)

However, although quite limited in number and quality, there are some moments in this part of the novel in which the prevailing order of constructed meanings and conventions is suspended, and it becomes possible for characters to behave in a freer way, which echoes Foucault’s idea of heterotopias. In the atmosphere of freedom that emerges, characters can behave in ways that are not deemed favourable by the conventions of the dining room, drawing room, or public space in London, an example of which can be seen when the narrative states, “it was very hot, and the heat, the food, the immense space, and perhaps some less well-defined cause produced a comfortable drowsiness and a sense of happy relaxation in them. They did not say much, but felt no constraint in being silent” (149). It is in this moment of relatively liberating and liberated space that Arthur takes a walk with Susan; they kiss and become engaged, being unaware that they are overseen by any others (Rachel and Hewet):

They lay in each other’s arms and had no notion that they were observed. Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the trees above them . . . They saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened. The man then sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her face, as though she were not altogether conscious. (152)

184 Disliking what they have encountered, perhaps because it echoes something in their minds that they are not ready to acknowledge, Rachel and Hewet will soon, nevertheless-- and ironically--, experience a similar moment of love and embrace in a similar space of freedom and un-restraint (during the trip to natives’ village).

Similar to the first trip to the hilltop view of Santa Marina, another trip is organized to fulfil their curiosity about their new living space. This second trip understandably attracts more attention from critics and scholars, since it includes more direct and blunt expressions of anti-imperialist and feminist criticism of contemporary English society. In this respect, critics such as Nick Montgomery observe some similarities in the structure of Woolf’s entire novel with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (37). As Montgomery points out, both novels start their journey at the same place, the Thames Estuary (37), and take their characters across an ocean to an unknown continent where they later continue their travel inland by river (to the Amazon river in The Voyage Out and to the Congo river in Heart of Darkness). Even though the protagonist of The Voyage Out is not a male adventurer working for a colonial trading company, as in Heart of Darkness, its young female protagonist goes through a similar kind of experience (travelling in a continent that is foreign and unknown to her) that also leads to strong effects on her mind and body– she experiences her mental growth but bodily death (whereas Marlow in the Conrad novella experiences a mental breakdown, but survives physically). Moreover, as in Conrad’s novella, the “heart of darkness” is not only found far away in what is deemed foreign and unknown, but also, and perhaps or, in what is familiar and established as the civilised center of colonial power: London and all it stands for.

It is important to note that Rachel trusts in a man, and becomes sufficiently free of London’s grip to acknowledge and declare that she loves this man only when she travels up the Amazon River “into the heart of the night” (300) and goes deep into the jungle:

The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. Faster and faster they walked . . .

185 clasped each other in their arms, then releasing themselves, dropped to the earth . . . Sounds stood out from the background . . . they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a remote world. “We love each other,” Terence repeated . . . (306)

As Montgomery claims in his psycholinguistic analysis of the novel, the trip into the wilderness serves as a sublime release from the symbolic order, a space released from the authority of the domineering systems of the world outside, for both Rachel and Hewet (49). Deep in the Amazon jungle, far away from the other travellers, they are liberated from the ruling conventions of London and are able to reveal their feelings to each other in the way that they desire, as Susan and Arthur have done before. However, this does not seem to last long, for Rachel murmurs “‘Terrible – terrible’” all of a sudden, which, according to a number of critics, echoes Kurtz’s last words of dread in Heart of Darkness: “‘The horror! The horror!’” (97). This might be because she somehow realizes that it is impossible totally to escape London and its oppressing conventions, which can be deduced from her explanation that she finds the endless repetition of the ‘cruel’ movement of water in the distance terrible: “‘Terrible—terrible,’” she murmured after another pause, but in saying this she was thinking as much of the persistent churning of the water as of her own feeling. On and on it went in the distance, the senseless and cruel churning of the water” (307). In fact, what follows after Rachel utters her feelings of terror upon their confession of love also implies the inescapable existence of London and its overwhelming conventions as a background to their lives. Elsewhere during this trip, apart from this extraordinary utterance, Rachel seems to act under a degree of compulsion, particularly when she speaks, as Larsson has pointed out (23-24), reminding the reader of her earlier description by Helen as a girl who has “a hesitation in speaking” (14) due to her lack of proper education. It is observed that on several occasions during their walk back from the jungle Rachel is shown to repeat what Hewet is saying or doing: “‘We love each other,’ Terence said. ‘We love each other,’ she repeated” (306). Sounding like an echo of Hewet, Rachel follows him slavishly: “Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped, turning where he turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant of why he stopped or why he turned” (307). As this walk

186 demonstrates, the conventional gender hierarchy has been re-established, and Rachel seems to return to her previous state of acting like a submissive and ignorant girl who lives up to the ideals of the patriarchy. However, here as throughout the novel, the narrative never renders any circumstances stable; instead, it oscillates between London and its oppressive conventions and movements or situated moments, of freedom from them. Therefore, it suddenly reverses the gender hierarchy of the conversation letting Rachel speak first and Hewet afterwards, though not in a hierarchical manner, but as if simultaneously: “‘This is happiness’” she says. “On the heels of her words he answered, ‘This is happiness,’ upon which they guessed that the feeling had welled up in both of them at the same time” (319).

The narrative’s reestablishment of the conventional gender hierarchy and other domineering systems of London becomes intensified after Rachel and Hewet return to the other travellers to start their journey up the river. In an effort to resituate Rachel in the dominant rhetoric of family life, Hewet confirms that marriage is their future together in London, while walking along the jungle path: “A vision of walking with her through the streets of London came before his eyes. “We will go for walks together,” he said. The simplicity of the idea relieved them, and for the first time they laughed” (317). They are awakened from their English fantasy and recognize the presence of the South American jungle when they stumble into the natives’ village where they are exposed to the stares of the native women engaged in work. The native women in this scene are shown as “squatting on the ground in triangular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting straw or in kneading something in bowls” (320). Their hands stop for a moment and “their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed upon them with the motionless inexpensive gaze of those removed from each other far beyond the plunge of speech” (320). Even though they go on with their work, their stares continue and follow the travellers, “passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously not without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly” (321). However, this staring ends as soon as the natives resume their work: “The women’s hands became busy again with the straw; their eyes dropped. If they moved, it was to fetch something from the hut, or to catch a straying child, or to cross the

187 space with a jar balanced on their heads; if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh unintelligible cry” (321). Sight of these women fills Rachel and Hewet with a sudden surge of melancholy, thinking that they –perhaps all of humanity-- are not significant or unique and never will be:

‘Well,’ Terrence sighed at length, ‘it makes us seem insignificant, doesn’t it?’ Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever and ever, she said, those women sitting under trees, the trees and the river. They turned away . . . They had not gone far before they began to assure each other once more that they were in love, were happy, were content; but why was it so painful being in love, why was there so much pain in happiness? (321)

As Nadeau and Amherst claim, the narrator’s focus on the village women and their female labour (their plaiting straw, preparing food, and breastfeeding children) together with Rachel’s claim that “it would go on for ever and ever . . . those women sitting under trees” implies an identification between Rachel and the native women (20). Rachel realizes the economic mission at the heart of voyages into this space which serves as a part of the imperial machine of their world back in London, and suddenly becomes aware that she too is a part of a world-system of women and children that will last forever. Wollaeger, in this regard, focuses on the image of the native women plaiting straw, which he regards as an allusion to Rachel’s previous complaints to the Dalloways that Austen’s marriage-plot novels are “so like a tight plait” (64). As Wollaeger remarks, Rachel is expected to be happy with her engagement to Hewet, which happens just before this scene, but she only feels pain, similar to her earlier pain during her confession of love to Hewet (64). What Rachel discovers in the jungle is the similarity between the native woman’s experience and her own place in the patriarchal system of the British Empire. Maternity and domesticity function as the primary labour of the women in the village, and it will also be Rachel’s expected duty in her approaching role as a wife in London. She realizes that women are essential cogs in the imperial machine (as described by Richard Dalloway in the ship), and both women on the periphery and those in the capital are exploited as reproducers of empire and imperial labour, given a restricted

188 lot and specified duties to be conducted mainly at home in order to keep the system going.

Before moving on to what happens in Rachel’s life after her visit to the village, the representations of native women and villagers require detailed examination. Although the narrative portrays the hostile stares of the native women that confront and discomfort the English tourists, these women are not given a voice to react to the imperial discourse of exploitation at all. They remain silent during most of the scene, and (again, similar to the indigenous people encountered in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), even “if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh unintelligible cry” (The Voyage Out 321). Johnson, draws attention to the alignment between the natives’ relative speechlessness and Rachel’s earlier description as a girl who talks hesitatingly, and claims that “any parallels between Rachel and the South Americans rest solely on their respective failure to participate in or interrupt imperialist discourse” (76). On the other hand, considering Mohanty’s observation that third- world women are often characterized as domestic, sexually constrained and uneducated in contrast to Western white women who define themselves as modern, educated, and having control over their own bodies and lives [n.22: Mohanty, 337]15, Nadeau and Amherst regard the natives’ silence as a necessary tool in the narrative, against which Rachel finds her voice to resist Hewet’s efforts to domesticate her (21). Native women in the jungle serve as tools rather than subjects of Woolf’s feminist protest, notwithstanding their contribution to Rachel’s feminist awakening, because the narrative keeps them silent and imagines no future for them outside of their current colonial condition. As Rachel states, they will remain under the same trees by the same river leading their circumstanced lives forever.

Representation of the natives in general aligns with that of native women in the narrative, in that even though they are regarded as physically more attractive than

15 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12.3 (1984): 333-358. JSTOR.

189 the English, they are never given a voice or envisioned with an alternative way of living or an alternative living space. For instance, presenting an indigenous man as a magnificent physical specimen, the text compares the sight of him with that of an Englishman:

Mr. Flushing, advancing into the centre of the clearing, was engaged in talk with a lean majestic man, whose bones and hollows at once made the shapes of the Englishman’s body appear ugly and unnatural . . . When sweetmeats were offered them, they put out great red hands to take them, and felt themselves treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive people. (320-321)

Such descriptions of the English as stiff, conquering soldiers, formal and alienated from their bodies, in contrast to descriptions of the natives as instinctive and naturally beautiful are seen in other parts of the novel as well, as in the part where the history of the colonialization of Santa Marina is depicted (94-95), or in the part where the sailors taking the visitors to the native village laugh behind the backs of the English, most probably because of their formal clothing (315). However, even though the characters and focalisers concede that physically the indigenous people could be far more attractive and better suited to their own climate, they do not concede that their ways of life could be in any way better, or that there could be any similarity between the habitats of the indigenous people and those of the English visitors, as seen in St. John’s description of the nature of the natives’ village in the forest as full of danger and maddening (310) or the prejudices of the English visitors towards the village, thinking that it could lead to damage in body or mind (298).

Leaving behind the native women, the sight of whom made her aware of her position in the British Empire, Rachel seems to reflect on and resist the patriarchal duties that would follow her engagement and marriage to Hewet. The narrative, in this part of the novel, also implicitly points to some characteristics of Hewet’s attitude and ideas that are in line with patriarchy, and contrasts them with Rachel’s present state of mind, which is characterized by a focus on her freedom. The narrative strikingly shows Hewet’s attitudes by means of one of the two scenes in the novel in which Rachel, who is incidentally revealed to be a highly accomplished pianist, is disrupted

190 while playing her piano, during which she imagines a Bach fugue as creating a solid form. In the first of these scenes she is interrupted by Mrs Dalloway’s entering her cabin on board the boat (57); Hewet, however, is depicted as sitting in the same room as her, and repeatedly interrupting her creative acts (for she is again using the complicated music of a late Beethoven sonata to construct an architectural form in her mind) with his unimaginative ideas on a book he wants to write. When Rachel complains, he admits that he has been deliberately trying to stop her, and shows that he has no artistic sensibilities whatsoever, by saying, “I've no objection to nice, simple tunes-indeed, I find them very helpful to literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain” (329). This implies that Rachel’s art and individuality can only exist as long as it helps Hewet proceed in what he deems significant for him, an insight into Hewet’s non-egalitarian views which has also been shown earlier, when he told Rachel, with no awareness of the contradictions inherent in ‘keeping’ someone, and being in a position to ‘give’ or ‘allow’ freedom, and true freedom, or in the very idea of being ‘free’ while being bound ‘together’:

“I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in my work, hindering me . . .” He stopped . . . “Oh, you’re free!” he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought of her, “and I’d keep you free. We’d be free together . . .” (274-275)

In the piano-interrupting scene, upon Hewet’s protest, Rachel stops playing and instead starts writing replies to congratulation cards, as suggested by Hewet (who does not consider undertaking this duty), while he reads a novel. As seen from this episode, Hewet’s actions contradict his claims that he likes her being “free, like the wind or the sea” (275) or that “he liked the impersonality which [music] produced in her,” the moods in which she became “quite forgetful of him” (329). Being as traditional as her father, Hewet wants Rachel’s energies or thoughts to revolve around him, and wants her to be the inspirational background music to his accomplishments. In fact, the narrative explicitly states that he feels jealousy over Rachel’s being able to “cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away to unknown

191 places where she had no need of him” (341). Hewet’s and others’ increasing number of expectations arising from her position as his fiancée make Rachel reflect more on her nature and what she actually desires to have in her life: “. . . I want to see England there—London there—all sorts of people—why shouldn’t one? why should one be shut up all by oneself in a room?’” (340). She realizes that she “wanted many more things than the love of one human being—the sea, the sky. She turned again the looked at the distant blue, which was so smooth and serene where the sky met the sea; she could not possibly want only one human being” (340-341).

As seen, Hewet’s understanding of his future marriage to Rachel is revealed gradually, after they become engaged to each other. Being engaged allows him to consider him in roles quite unconformable with the personality that he believes he had fallen in love with, and also in contradiction to his expostulations about disliking conventional married or domestic life. Importantly, for example, while arguing over Rachel’s insistence that her life will be different from those of well-wishing women who send her clichéd congratulation cards, he suddenly changes the topic to that of having children. Telling her that these women are absurdly parroting each other in sending cards just because others send them, he notes that Mrs Thornbury, one of these women, is nevertheless splendid, with her “too many children” and “kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity . . . Isn’t she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t it?” (332). Hewet’s use of the native village image of a tree by the river passing through time (recalling Rachel’s horrified utterances as she becomes aware of the unmitigating repetitiveness of the river’s sound, at the time of their engagement), together with his sudden mention of Ralph’s promotion, seems to arise from an effort to situate Rachel within imperialist discourse and cast her in a future (entirely essential, deeply rooted, and unfree) role as an unchanging and supportive wife and fertile mother. Rachel responds to this by saying that she “won’t have eleven children” (332). However, Hewet, in an effort to domesticate her, insists on having children: “We must have a son and we must have a daughter…because, let alone the

192 inestimable advantage of being our children, they’d be so well brought up” (332). While he goes on to imagine an education that will suggest the thoughts of infinity and rob his daughter of practicality, and teach his son to laugh at “great men,” Rachel insists that her children should not be like fine English gentlemen such as St. John Hirst, for whom Hewet confesses his great admiration. He claims that Rachel will never be able to understand why they should not be without Hirst and men like him because she is “essentially feminine” (332-333): “. . . with all your virtues you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts . . . ” Rachel’s insistence on refusing fine English men as models for her future children in these lines apparently suggests that her personal and mental development has reached the point of understanding that, contrary to Richard Dalloway’s assertions (65), English men’s records, neither of misdeeds caused in their colonial lands or inside England regarding class-based ways of living as claimed by Richard nor of limitations surrounding women’s lives are clean at all.

Another way in which Hewet reveals his patriarchal inclinations is discussed by the critic Larsson, who, investigating the novel for whether it makes possible for women to transcend their culturally determined destiny and lot, ends her investigation by negating such a possibility, saying that it seems impossible for female characters to escape London and its conventions. She particularly focuses on Hewet’s illustrating his dream of love and marriage with a walk in modern London, in which he ends up in an exclusively male area of power (Larsson 25). As she remarks, Rachel and Hewet have had to leave London to find each other, but London remains the city on which Hewet’s vision of the future and marriage is built, as he reveals, saying, “‘We shall live in London’” (324) (Larsson 25). Hewet illustrates his dream by describing an imaginary walk in the area of London that Larsson claims to be central in all of Woolf’s novels (25): “On the whole, what I should like best at this moment,” Terence pondered, “would be to find myself walking down Kingsway, by those big placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. Perhaps I might go and look over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. Then I’d go along the Strand past the shops with all the new books in them, and through the little archway into the Temple” (339). Larsson finds

193 it no coincidence that Hewet envisions himself walking in Kingsway, “the grand boulevard constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century to connect the northern parts of London with the centre” and to “modernise London around the turn of the century” (25). Hewet wants to become a part of this modern project which had turned “what had until then been a somewhat decrepit street” into a modern area of “new businesses and publishers” (25). However, he ends his dream walk in the Temple, the ancient and exclusively male area of lawyers and economists, which Larsson regards as an implication that Hewet “is not whole-heartedly engaged in his commitment to a modern, equitable relationship and therefore merely ends up where he belongs, in what had for centuries been an area of manifest male power” (27). Whether this is a result of his old habits or his lack of insight, Hewet is evidently not consistently following their earlier dreams of having an equitable relationship. Considering that it is London that stands in the way, it is important to say that such an implication of hindrance of movement and progress is again conveyed through a reliance on space and place in the novel.

Occurring just before Rachel’s illness and death, the battle between Rachel and Hewet indicates that Rachel’s death is (at least symbolically) related to her rejection of patriarchal imperial order. Nadeau and Amherst, in this regard, underscore the idea that this rejection becomes particularly apparent if Rachel’s fevered hallucinations in her death bed are taken into account, “with their mixed images of metaphorical wombs and metropolitan London” (22): “In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down the wall” (373). If analysed closely, it can be observed that this dream resembles her earlier dreams of a long narrow tunnel in which she felt trapped and afraid of deformed men, following Richard Dalloway’s molestation on the ship. What Bradshaw draws attention to in both of these dreams is that the reader is transported back to “Wapping, the district in London’s East End from where the Euphrosyne sets sail”, conjuring the image of

194 London as a “sedentary miser” once again (126). Stating that this part of London had been occupied by prostitutes and thieves when Thames Tunnel first opened, Bradshaw claims that Rachel’s Thames Tunnel dreams suggest that she “has few options as a woman without means” (without getting married) as “London’s prostitutes and criminalised down-and-outs have none” (128). They underscore the fact that Rachel and these prostitutes are all victims of the patriarchal oppression which such men as Richard Dalloway embody. A number of other critics also focus their attention on these dreams, pointing to their being important signs of Rachel’s fear of marriage. While David Adams considers these dreams to express a mixture of sex, empire, and the impotence of patriarchy (209), Mark Wollaeger regards them as showing “sexual revulsion” and an association of Rachel’s sexual awareness with the prostitutes on the London streets whom she fears (53). Laura Doyle also asserts that through death Rachel escapes from her nightmares and thus “retreats specifically from a sexuality supported and regulated by Empire” (144). Considering these analyses, it can be claimed that Rachel’s death may be regarded as a wilful choice of departure from the patriarchal and imperial machine of society in that, through death, she escapes the fate that was revealed to her by the sight of the native women in the village, and rejects the conventional and unfree future offered to her by Hewet’s projected married life in London. Even though her spatial movement from London to Santa Marina does not provide her with freedom from an imperial sexual economy of production, it grants her the chance to recognize her circumstanced imprisonment within the system, and reject it.

Many critics and scholars including Hermione Lee have criticized The Voyage Out because of this tragic and abrupt ending (50). However, as Larsson claims, the novel, in fact, does not end with Rachel’s death, since it continues for two further chapters. In the first of these, the narrative describes the reactions of hotel guests and other characters to her death, often portraying guests as trying to make sense of it, somewhat in the role of a confused chorus in a Greek tragedy. For instance, Miss Thornbury says, “‘. . . the older one grows . . . the more certain one becomes that there is a reason’” (403). Several other guests such as Arthur and Mrs Flushing put

195 the blame on the excursion along the Amazon River. Mrs Flushing particularly feels guilty for having encouraged Rachel to join in the trip; however, her husband is convinced that Rachel caught a deadly infection at the Ambroses’ villa, because of never washing vegetables properly. For Mrs Paley, on the other hand, the fault lies in the bad drinking water. While their comments and sadness fill in the narrative for some pages, these characters are shown to be able to forget about her death and go on with their daily lives after a relatively short time, echoing Hewet’s fluctuating realizations that life “could go on without her; she could die . . . He could not let her die; he could not live without her. But after a momentary struggle, the curtain fell again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly. It was all going on—going on still, in the same way as before . . . He went on giving orders, arranging with Mrs. Chailey, writing out lists . . .” (392). In the final chapter the same idea of persistent (and, to Rachel, ‘terrible’ (307)) flow of life is again underlined. The guests are preparing to return to London when a terrifying but brief storm breaks out. When it stops, the guests continue with their activities, chatting, playing chess, packing and gossiping as usual (416). Rachel’s death and the severe storm have smitten them with misery and fear for a brief while, but life still goes on as Rachel had acknowledged with the revelation of: “the persistent churning of the water . . . On and on it went in the distance, the senseless and cruel churning of the water” (307). As suggested by the narrative, neither a happily ending love story nor Rachel’s death is an ending. Human tragedy merely continues. Even though Rachel and Hewet will not be able to walk together in the streets of London, London, with all its connotations, is still there and walks will be taken in it by other couples.

To conclude, although the novel does not grant Rachel the opportunity of constructing a living space in London that could conform with her newly- acknowledged desires, and even though it does not reconfigure London and its private and public spaces in a way that frees them from the regulations and norms of the dominant power systems, it deflates its own quite pessimistic portrayal of life in London or in London society (even when located elsewhere) by implying the changeability, heterogeneity and dynamicity of space through a voyage (mobility

196 between spaces) in which an ignorant and uneducated young woman is awakened to different configurations of places and ways of living in a new land. Through her increasing mobility in a new place, Rachel opens her mind to the truth behind the social issues and practices of her society, and recognizes how they overwhelm individuals to varying degrees depending on gender, class and nationality. She also becomes aware of how these domineering systems are interrelated and feed each other in order to maintain the big social system and its ideologies. The narrative, in this respect, portrays other characters such as Helen and Hewet, together with Rachel, as rendering a critique of London, also experiencing the different practices or spatial regulations of an unfamiliar culture overseas. By displaying the actions and reactions of characters who have left London and its traditions behind them, and particularly in the two forest scenes of the novel, London is transcended, pointing to the false rigidity of spatial constructs. In all of these spatial ways, the narrative effectively renders a social and political critique of conventional British society and implies the need for and possibility of change by pointing to the multi-faceted, pluralistic and dynamic nature of space.

4.2. Rendering London Multiple in Mrs Dalloway

Set on a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, in England just after World War I, Mrs Dalloway has been widely analysed and investigated by literary scholars and critics, particularly for its stylistic mastery in the stream of consciousness technique, its elements of feminism and the profound understanding of the human psyche it displays. Even though Woolf is usually regarded as a psychological novelist concerned with inner explorations of characters rather than with explorations of social and political issues, she herself acknowledges in her diary that in Mrs Dalloway, especially, she wanted to “criticize the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.2, 248). Moreover, the many titles she gave to Mrs Dalloway before its publication in 1925 reveals Woolf’s interest in conveying social criticism as well. As seen in A Writer’s Diary, Woolf alternated between several titles such as “The Hours” (56), “At Home” (15), “The

197 Party” (15), and “The Prime Minister” (47), all of which, as Tseng (238) claims, point to the distinctions drawn in the novel between domestic and public spheres: while “The Hours” and “The Prime Minister” imply the regulated city of London and the state power, “At Home” and “The Party” refer to the feminine domestic space of retreat and its function determined by the dominant ideologies. Considering these, this part of the dissertation claims that Mrs Dalloway is concerned with social and political issues of society and how these issues affect individuals’ lives, which it achieves particularly through its representations of different public spaces.

The action of Mrs Dalloway unfolds on a single day in June 1923, tracing the movements of several characters through the city. These are mostly Clarissa Dalloway who travels to buy flowers for her party at night, Peter Walsh who has just returned from India, Septimus Warren Smith who has gone mad due to his experiences in the war, and Elizabeth Dalloway who goes shopping with her history teacher Miss Kilman. Their individual perceptions of their routes are so meticulously conveyed by these characters that they can be traced on a London map. As Larsson maintains, “with the realist literature of the nineteenth century [. . .] maps of the expanding European metropolises became an important part of the art of narrating a novel” (7), and in works of novelists such as Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola and Charles Dickens, the protagonists can be followed as they wander in the streets of Paris and London, although actual maps were not printed in the novels. It was later in the modernist novels that city maps played a larger role in narration (Larsson 7), an example of which is Ulysses by James Joyce, which is claimed to have been written with a map of Dublin in front of him (Bulson 69). In the same vein, Squier argues that Woolf adopted a similar practice while writing Mrs Dalloway, building her claim on a sketch of a map showing the walks in the novel which she found in Woolf’s archive (11). What Bulson here describes as the larger role of city maps in narration is that modernist novels do not render large descriptions of these streets and places as realist novels do, but they rather name them because what is interesting to the modernist novelist is the inner reality and perception of the human being regarding these places (69). This explains why Woolf’s novels mention street

198 addresses, walking routes and directions rather than just describing things around in detail. Woolf herself gave expression to her refusal of giving long descriptions of places and the tendency of linking the places named in novels with concrete geographical places by saying, perhaps a little humorously, that it has the risk of disappointing visitors to such places (The Essays of Virginia Woolf 33). Just as Woolf rejects the practices of the realist authors and their interpreters regarding their use of places and their way of conveying these places, she is also against the traditional, static and homogenous view of geographical places and emphasizes their dynamic, heterogeneous and changing character instead, which can be seen in representations of public spaces in Mrs Dalloway. Anticipating Lefebvre’s idea of social space as the space which is experienced and, therefore, can be changed by the individual, as well as Tuan’s idea that places are spaces that are endowed with human meaning, Mrs Dalloway conveys the public spaces of London in a way that shows them as transformed by the walks taken by characters into spaces filled with meanings that the individual experiences provide. Such a portrayal can also be regarded as a telling example to what David Harvey claims about modernist novels’ representations of space: a novel approach to time and space, characterized by relativism and perspectivism, conveying time and space exactly as they are perceived by individuals in lived experience, which results in using simultaneity and juxtaposition (239). The novel strikingly demonstrates how public spaces of historical or social importance turn into concrete places which yield meaning when characters look at and relate to them. Therefore, it can be claimed that Mrs Dalloway adopts an understanding of place and space which is closely tied to individual perception, and allows them to interact, merge or differentiate. By rendering London through different perceptions each time, the narrative treats London as its major protagonist, alive, fragmented and dynamic as a human being.

The geographical metaphor that Woolf used in her diary while she was writing Mrs Dalloway can serve as a striking example of how Mrs Dalloway is highly concerned with human geography and how capable spaces are to unite or separate people: “how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters . . . The idea is that the caves shall

199 connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 263). The novel persistently underscores the idea that people exist and live in connection to each other and to places, while observing and demonstrating the ways in which spaces reinforce boundaries of gender, class and nationality at the same time. London is portrayed as imbued with spaces that are occupied differently by women and men, and by the wealthy and the poor, and that reinforce binaries such as public and private, sacred and ordinary, and past and present. It is filled with symbols of authority such as Buckingham Palace, Westminster, and St. Paul’s Cathedral. It actively places characters within the patriarchal, class-stratified and imperialist system of their society, an example of which can be seen in the fact that characters in the novel are often introduced by referring to where they reside in London. For instance, Mrs Dalloway lives in Westminster, Mrs Dempster in Kentish Town, and the mothers in Regent’s Park come from Pimlico, all of which suggest their class backgrounds. As Tuan remarks in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, these geographical signifiers serve as “centers of value” (18) which embody a society’s ideas of power, sacredness and legitimacy. Tuan suggests that these geographical markers “attract or repel in finely shaded degrees. To attend to them even momentarily is to acknowledge their reality and value” (18). Anticipating Tuan’s ideas, Mrs Dalloway exposes how London conveys its values and dominant ideologies through its public spaces and how these places are perceived differently by different characters.

As Tseng claims, even in a passage from an early version of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf seems to insist on her claims to convey and criticize certain social issues, which can be observed in her reference to Westminster, the political center of London where Clarissa Dalloway lives, as the “seat of time”:

It might have been the seat of time itself, this island of Westminster, the forge where the hours are made, and sent out, in various tones and tempers, to glide into the lives of the foot passengers, of studious workmen, desultory women within doors, who coming to the window looked up at the sky as the clock

200 struck, as if to say, What? Or Why? They had their choices of answers. (qtd16 in Tseng 22)

The image of the seat of time strikingly implies an efficient systematization of life in London here, regulated by Big Ben’s strokes and organizing individuals’ lives and activities into an imagined organism. The strokes of Big Ben are, in this respect, similar to other state symbols that are recurrently mentioned in the novel, such as the Queen, the Prime Minister, the Buckingham Palace, the Union Jack, and the British imperial dominions; all of these embody the social and political order imposed on the individuals living in London. As Fleishman argues, the use of such repeated images achieves “a systematic network of social elements” and “a vision of modern life on a national scale” (76). Although the passage above was ultimately omitted from the published version of the novel, the authoritative strokes of Big Ben appear to have the same effect on individual’s lives in the published version. For example, it is portrayed as interrupting Clarissa’s individual experience of time, which oscillates between past and present, as she travels in London, with its announcement of the “irrevocable” passage of public time (2). In opposition to the authority of the sound of Big Ben, the narrative later introduces the sound of another clock, St. Margaret’s, striking later than Big Ben, and associates it with the maternal power of inclusion and affection, which can be regarded as the narrative’s challenge to what Doreen Massey claims about time and space: the traditional coding of time as masculine (186). This sound is shown to be heard at the moment when Clarissa’s mind goes to three other women – Mrs Marsham and Ellie Henderson, described as “dull women” (109) whom she does not wish to have in her party, although it seems that the former has been invited, and Miss Kilman, her daughter’s unappealing tutor, a shopkeeper’s grand-daughter:

Love – but here the other clock, the clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of odd and ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well with his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just, but she must remember all sorts of little things

16 qtd in DiBattista, “Virginia Woolf’s Memento Mori” 43

201 besides – Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for Ices – all sorts of little things came flooding and lapping and dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke which lay flat like a bar of gold on the sea. Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices. She must telephone now at once. Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles. (119)

Making a connection between Clarissa’s decision – possibly – to invite a connection (Ellie Henderson) she did not wish to include to her party (while definitely telephoning for “glasses for ices”) and the maternal image of the late clock “with its lap full of trifles,” these lines render the politics of the temporal “other” that questions the dominant social order and relations by challenging Big Ben’s law of exclusion, suppression, and forgetfulness. With these ambiguous and conflicting temporalities, the narrative effectively establishes London as a dynamic space for opposing politics.

In addition to these authoritative images, other images of dominant ideologies fill the novel, an example of which is the mysterious car, reported to be carrying the Queen or another member of the royal family through Piccadilly. It reminds the people there of the clear-cut differences between their ordinary selves and upper- class rulers, particularly regarding spatial configurations: “there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England” (13). Looking at the symbol of the sovereign power, those all who happen to be there feel the same patriotic sense of pride and dignity. In this scene of the novel, Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a member of the Parliament, also stands among people who are watching the car in awe. It is quite interesting that she makes an analogy between herself and the Queen, in that she invites guests to her parties home just as the Queen does in Buckingham Palace, which may be a critical implication of the novel regarding the roles assigned to upper-class women in society: assuming the role of the party hostess, they fulfil their roles of arranging social events at home. In another part of the novel, the Strand and Chancery are shown to suggest authority and state power

202 to characters, which, for Elizabeth Dalloway, implies the excitement of professional life, so different from her life in Westminster: “It was so serious; it was so busy . . . She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament, if she found it necessary, all because of the Strand” (128). As seen from the examples given, these landmarks convey an image of London characterized by authority, order, and boundaries for its members regarding their gender, class or nationality. However, the novel also tries to create a liminal space that erases these boundaries, even if for a few moments, and create connections among people as previously implied by Woolf’s image of hidden caves connecting her characters. In this regard, the organizing of Clarissa’s party acts as such a liminal space involving this connection and unity, and attempts to create a festival space in the novel. Before showing this brief and partial moment of connection, though, this study will initially demonstrate how Mrs Dalloway conveys space as a social space as well, in addition to its representations as a physical and mental entity, and underscores its characteristics as being heterogeneous, multifaceted, dynamic, and open to change by analysing the walks taken by different characters in London.

A number of walks taken by a variety of characters fill in the landscape of London in Mrs Dalloway. In each one of these walks London and its places are perceived and experienced differently depending on the characters’ gender, class, nationality, and the concerns or attitudes that arise from these factors. This being the reason, the experience of the city conveyed by Clarissa differs much from the one by Septimus Warren Smith, by his wife Lucrezia, or by Peter. Even though they all wander through London, the places they experience are not the same, and they sympathize with or disdain different things in the city. Regarding the fact that Clarissa Dalloway is the central character in the novel, it will be wise to start with her perception and experience of London.

Mrs Dalloway expresses a number of distinct ways in which women experienced the city, through its skilful use of free indirect discourse. In Clarissa’s case her free indirect speech demonstrates and parallels her ease and joyful feeling of more

203 freedom on the streets of London. She sets out for her short journey in London on a June morning to buy some flowers herself (though her house is full of servants) for the party she is holding in the evening. Her trip is from her home in the well-off district west of Westminster Palace to her florist’s on Bond Street. It seems that the city itself with its parks, crowded streets, its traffic and rush is the thing that awakens Clarissa Dalloway from the “emptiness” (27) that has agonized her in her attic room at home. She appears to be filled with a euphoric happiness with life, triggered by the sound of Big Ben:

For having lived in Westminster . . . one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street . . . In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (2)

For Clarissa it seems as if this rush and movement of London are what makes her survive, giving her a feeling that she is a part of something larger. While her identity has been subsumed under the title Mrs Dalloway, her walk on the streets of London gives her a temporary anonymity, which grants her time for private reverie.

Clarissa’s experience of London is mostly concentrated on her interior world rather than exterior. Her personal memories unfold as she moves around the city, interrupted only in a few instances such as in her encounter with her old friend Hugh Whitbread in the Park. Even though some features of the city are mentioned such as the noise of the traffic, the books in Hatchards’ shop window or the salmon, gloves and pearls of Bond Street, Clarissa is mostly engaged in her thoughts and memories of past. This can be seen even in her first step into the city from her house when she says, “What a lark! What a plunge!”, and remembers flinging open the French windows at her family home at Bourton as a young woman (1). It is followed by her

204 memories of Peter Walsh and lasts until the present moment of London takes reigns. Such a beginning symbolizes the pattern of Clarissa’s trip in London throughout the narrative, a private struggle between the present and the past. For instance, her unexpected meeting with Hugh in the present time is immediately followed by distant memories of her youth as well as more recent ones with her husband and her daughter. However, for most of the time it is her past which characterizes her walk. Except for the time when she is shortly observed by her neighbour, Scope Purvis, at the beginning of her walk, and her encounter with Hugh, Clarissa is quite undisturbed and insular during her walk. The privacy she thus achieves gives her the opportunity of being herself and enjoying her existence. She is interrupted by different people at home such as Peter Walsh and her family from Richard to Elizabeth, each with his/her demands to her as a former suitor, husband and daughter. However, she has the chance of being simply herself in the city: “She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street . . .” (8). Putting an end to her conventional identities as a wife and mother for a short period of time, her London walk bestows her with a space for her private stream of consciousness to flow freely. The kind of privacy she achieves in her walk in London is being invisible to other Londoners, and also shedding of her responsibilities to family members, becoming invisible to them as well.

As Domancich claims, Clarissa’s walk in the city characterized by her turn inward might be an indication of the fact that she is much more involved with personal and intimate matters than those of the social and mainstream (20). She seems to enjoy the feeling of life itself rather than the matters of the State in the city: “Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that” (4-5). It is seen that Clarissa herself acknowledges this when she imagines herself being accompanied by Peter at that moment in the city. She points to the difference in their perception of the city when she says,

205 If he were with me now what would he say? – some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness . . . they came back in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning . . . But Peter – however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink – Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said. (5)

The different ways in which Clarissa and Peter perceive public spaces in this excerpt can serve as effective examples to Lefebvre’s claim that space is not an absolute and fixed entity of homogeneous character, but it is multi-faceted, heterogeneous and dynamic because of the fact that it is a construct. This part of the novel also clearly demonstrates the reciprocal nature of the relationship between individuals and spaces, implied by Tuan: Clarissa is shaped by the spaces she wanders in to the same degree that the spaces in which she travels are constructed by her individual perception and experience of them.

In Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (2005), Alter argues that Mrs Dalloway stands as an unusual urban novel in modernist European fiction due to the fact that in those other novels metropolises are almost always filled with fear and alienation (whereas Mrs Dalloway is an exhilarating celebration of the energy created by the busy parks, streets, roaring traffic and crowded shopping areas of London (104)). However, a closer look into the novel shows that even in terms of Clarissa Dalloway’s thoughts there are at least two pictures of the town, the other being a gloomy one in which inhabitants of the city seem less alive than the city itself, as claimed by Larsson (108). In this respect, the novel depicts Clarissa Dalloway as a compliant member and, at the same time, a victim of the landscape of order, hierarchy and empire. Phillips in Virginia Woolf against Empire (1994) regards her as an embodiment of the self-absorbed disinterest of the privileged (vii). This can be obviously seen when the narrative focuses on her feelings for the suffering of Armenians or Albanians:

206 And people would say, “Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.” She cared so much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again) – no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? (112)

As seen, the fact that Clarissa is unable to sincerely empathise with different nationalities suffering from cruelty might be an indication of her compliance into one of the domineering systems of her society, the nationalist system, which actually creates such anguish and brutality in her society.

Despite the indulgences and privileges her class or nationality yields, Clarissa is also one of those characters of the novel whose lives are reduced to certain circumstances, roles and spaces. As Larsson maintains, all the walks taken by the characters in the novel effectively show the limited area in which each character moves around if tracked on a London map (127), which might be an indication of their being restricted in where they go and what kinds of activities they can engage in these places. In this respect, Clarissa’s short, focused and direct walk from her home to the shopping street and back again shows how she is governed by social conventions. She leaves home for the florist’s, prompted by her scrupulous preparations for the party, which demonstrates that her walk is not for her sake, but it is the result of social obligations. In fact, Clarissa herself acknowledges that she is very much governed by people’s expectations of her and her own desire to make a good impression. When she passes the corner of Bond Street and starts walking along Piccadilly, it is to see whether she can find, Hugh Whitbread’s wife, Evelyn, something like a present:

that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably dried-up little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment cordial; before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of women’s ailments. How much she wanted it – that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she

207 knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even differently! (7-8)

Imagining herself like “Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man” (8), following her wishes of having her life over again, Clarissa feels the barrenness of her life at home when she returns home. When public activities are in full swing in the streets of London, Clarissa comes home: “like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went, upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom . . . There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At mid-day they must disrobe” (27). The sun being hot on people in the streets on the June day, Clarissa’s house is, in contrast, “cool as a vault,” where she “felt like a nun who has left the world,” inescapably surrounded by “the familiar veils” and “old devotions” that are “her life” (25).

In “The Flâneur, the Flâneuse, and the Hostess: Virginia Woolf’s (Un)Domesticating Flanerie in Mrs. Dalloway”, Tseng asks a crucial question about whether the walks of female characters in Mrs Dalloway can be regarded as flanerie and answers it by claiming that they can be taken as the first appearances of the flâneuse in the early twentieth century (247). She points to the importance of shopping, which, she thought, enabled middle-class women to walk in public spaces in freedom in the early period of the twentieth century even though she accepts the concerns of those critics who find it debatable whether the female shopper can be regarded as analogous to the traditional idea of a male flâneur enjoying the feeling of aimless roaming, sightseeing, and fleeting encounters in the city (233). She agrees with Mica Nava that shopping created an atmosphere “which legitimized the desire of women to look as well as be looked at – it enabled them to be both subject and object of the gaze, to appropriate, at one go, the pleasure/power of both the voyeur and the narcissist” (Nava 72). As these critics say, the flâneuse, in any case, owns the freedom of wandering and looking at the city, which makes her a seeing and desiring individual, rather than a passive being seen and desired. Therefore, although

208 Clarissa’s walk in the liveliness of streets in London stems from a domestic purpose – to buy flowers for her party, her flanerie is not notably different from any male characters’ in the novel. She enjoys the city and finds it absorbing as men do. However, she still does not benefit from the changes in women’s status and perception that younger women do. While her flânery stands for changes that were happening in social and cultural constructions of gender codes, her daughter Elizabeth’s walking in the city can be regarded as the beginning of younger women’s independence, unrestricted by traditional idea of femininity and their initial entry into the traditionally male-dominated public spheres.

Larsson argues that Elizabeth’s walking route in Mrs Dalloway noticeably differs from all the others in that her walk “goes from west to east and into the very part of central London to which Woolf consistently attributes the utopian potential of modernity”, unlike the other routes, which are from north to south (123). Embodying the emerging future flâneuse, Elizabeth ventures into the Strand unexpectedly, after leaving the “stuffy” stores where people buy petticoats and drinking her afternoon tea with her tutor, Miss Kilman (121). Following this, we learn that what motivated her to take this walk is a desire to escape from the oppressive presence of Westminster, her mother and the female identity being forced upon her by the society. She associates personal freedom with the country:

It was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning…. People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs. (126)

Such an equation between personal freedom and life out of town can also be seen in another part of the novel in which Clarissa, in her room, remembers her love for Sally Seton and their moonlight kiss in her family’s country house in Bourton. Throughout the novel Bourton is persistently pictured as a pastoral female world,

209 removed from the ideological and gendered space of heterosexuality, marriage and culture in Westminster both in time and space. Even though Woolf was aware of the traditional literary convention of associating and assigning women with natural or pastoral settings, she may have used such an association herself to highlight the alienation of women from human-made culture and their own sexuality.

Being a young lady from Westminster, Elizabeth turns into “a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting” (128) by walking in the streets of the Strand, and she seems unaffected by scruples that her mother “would not like her to be wandering off alone like this” (129) and “no Dalloways came down the Strand daily” (128). She feels exhilarated with her ride to the Strand:

She was delighted to be free. The fresh air was so delicious. It had been so stuffy in the Army and Navy Stores. And now it was like riding, to be rushing up Whitehall; and to each movement of the omnibus the beautiful body in the fawn-coloured coat responded freely like a rider, like the figure-head of a ship, for the breeze slightly disarrayed her; the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white painted wood; and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead, blank, bright, with the staring incredible innocence of sculpture. (127)

The narrative presents her bus journey alone along the Strand as an attack on the male preserve of the city. She is shown to approach St Paul’s “like someone penetrating on tiptoe, exploring a strange house by night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask her business” (128). As seen, Elizabeth is portrayed as trespassing on private property in these lines. The city becomes male private space and it possesses the extreme privacy of someone else’s home when the residents have gone to bed. For some critics such as Snaith, the bedroom image suggests sexual connotations: Elizabeth is putting herself, almost, in the position of “a prostitute, as well as ‘a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting’” (40).

Once she is in the Strand, Elizabeth starts to envision for herself a career in public service: “So she might be a doctor. She might be a farmer. Animals are often ill. She might own a thousand acres and have people under her”, and, as the narrative adds,

210 these thoughts arose “all because of the Strand” (127-128). The Strand, in this respect, can be regarded as a liminal space considering the fact that it joins the east and the west of London, and is very busy with all sorts of people, “with an air of greater lightness and gaiety than is apparent in the City . . . more women among the foot passengers, more looking into shop windows, and an absence of that hurried walk and preoccupied look which prevail in the City proper.”17 Moreover, the name itself implies a shoreline, or a beach, which is a prototypically liminal geographical place (even though it is just a street in London that runs parallel with the ‘strand’ of the river, hidden by buildings and the constructed embankment). Elizabeth feels happy looking at Chancery Lane and, venturing further into Fleet Street, approaches St. Paul’s Cathedral to be caught for a short time by a new feeling of community: “She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to her good. The noise was tremendous; and suddenly there were trumpets (the unemployed) blaring, rattling about in the uproar; military music; as if people were marching . . .” (129). Far away from the serene parks and quiet streets of Westminster and Mayfair, she is intruding into a new world, unlike her mother who goes out to the city to buy flowers for her party home.

Although some critics such as Clare Hanson (70) and Peter Childs (39) regard Elizabeth as the novel’s rebellious vision of the future, her rebellion ends when she starts thinking about the time: “She must dress for dinner. But what was the time? – where was a clock?” (128). Elizabeth travels back to her parents’ house in Westminster, and when the party ends, she is shown to be standing next to her father, dressed up and looking beautiful. As seen, her trip was only an adventure; not leading to anything different. In fact, some earlier descriptions of her have a number of hints (her representations, like those of her mother, show her taking her privileges for granted; never having thought about the poor (122) and being a skilled shopper (123)) to imply that she is going to conform to the system at the end, exactly as her

17 Charles Dickens (Jr.), Dickens's Dictionary of London, 1879 qtd in http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/TheStrand/strand.htm

211 mother did. Nevertheless, her trip along the Strand, during which she ventures into male preserves of public space and imagines a number of future careers open for her in the public sphere implies the constructedness, heterogeneity and dynamicity of space, and suggests the need for change in these places and traditional ways of living in the years to come.

Unlike Elizabeth, who enjoys her freedom and feels filled with promising ideas regarding her professional participation in the city in the years’ to come, Miss Kilman’s (Elizabeth’s history tutor’s) walk in the city is characterized by different concerns and affairs, and her alienation among people, and hopelessness about her present and future stand out. Miss Kilman is one of the war victims in the novel in that she lost her productive and fulfilling job as a teacher at a school during the war “for her views about the Germans . . . she would not pretend that the Germans were all villains” (115). The narrative, in this part of the novel, efficiently reflects a dark picture of British wartime nationalism as it shows prejudices that push Miss Kilman to her society’s margins and make her survive through her work for rich people like the Dalloways. Throughout her walk, Miss Kilman’s attention is focused on the differences between herself and privileged people of the city, particularly middle and upper class ladies such as Clarissa, which can also be clearly seen even at the beginning of her journey when she is leaving home:

Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh; but had her reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty; and did not, after all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; degradingly poor. Otherwise she would not be taking jobs from people like the Dalloways; from rich people, who liked to be kind. Mr. Dalloway, to do him justice, had been kind. But Mrs. Dalloway had not. She had been merely condescending. She came from the most worthless of all classes – the rich, with a smattering of culture. They had expensive things everywhere; pictures, carpets, lots of servants . . . She had been cheated. Yes, the word was no exaggeration, for surely a girl has a right to some kind of happiness? And she had never been happy, what with being so clumsy and so poor. (115)

Miss Kilman here is shown, like all the other characters, to have her own flawed and prejudiced thinking. She is evidently completely jealous of Clarissa. During her

212 walk, the liveliness of the city with a variety of shops, stores, and products seems to be what catches Miss Kilman’s attention and what makes her suffer from the fact that she is poor and unlucky: “. . . she walked down Victoria Street. She prayed to God. She could not help being ugly; she could not afford to buy pretty clothes . . . Sometimes lately it had seemed to her that, except for Elizabeth, her food was all that she lived for; her comforts; her dinner, her tea; her hot-water bottle at night” (120-121). After a disappointing meeting with Elizabeth (disappointing for Miss Kilman since Elizabeth will attend Clarissa’s party), Miss Kilman walks to Westminster Cathedral to seek peace and solace, and “to aspire above the vanities, the desires, the commodities, to rid herself both of hatred and love” (125). Social discriminations that have made her suffer and led to her alienation seem to disappear for a short period of time in the cathedral: “the variously assorted worshippers, now divested of social rank, almost of sex, as they raised their hands before their faces” (124-125). However, when their prayers are over, these worshipers become again “middle-class, English men and women, some of them desirous of seeing the wax works” (124-125). She becomes an obstacle to Mr Fletcher with whom she is sharing a pew, once the prayer ends: “But Mr. Fletcher had to go. He had to pass her, and being himself neat as a new pin, could not help being a little distressed by the poor lady’s disorder; her hair down; her parcel on the floor . . .” (124). Therefore, it can be claimed that even in the cathedral religion fails to erase conflicts among individuals. This idea has also been previously underscored by Clarissa in the part when she looks at the old lady next door through her window. She says that religion or love cannot solve what she terms “the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving . . . here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?” (118). Here the narrative again uses a spatial term - rooms - to depict the failure of thorough connection and understanding between people.

Lucrezia is another character like Miss Kilman who seems not to enjoy the city and who feels alienated from it due to her background. As mentioned in the previous

213 chapter, Lucrezia feels lonely and isolated in the streets of London, and continuously makes comparisons between Italy and Britain, elevating the former over the latter. For her and her husband Septimus, the crowded streets and parks which characters such as Clarissa, Elizabeth, Peter, Richard and Hugh celebrate are landscapes of hopelessness. Lucrezia, in a few instances, seems to feel isolated from the liveliness of the city due to the madness Septimus has developed: “Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible . . . and she could tell no one . . . To love makes one solitary, she thought” (19-20). However, the narrative also shows that her alienation from the city is due to the oppressive social system as well. While Lucrezia, the marginalized, and foreign other, associates the clocks of Harley Street with sinister forces of division, domination, and exploitation, which “counseled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion” (149), the sound of “a commercial clock” resonating from Oxford Street through Harley Street pleases a privileged person such as Hugh Whitbread who enjoys a surplus of time and money loitering in front of a shop window (149). Considering these examples, it can be maintained that the revelation of such different spatial perspectives in the novel uncovers the conflicts and inequalities existing in London, thereby encouraging a subversive potential within this complex area that comprises so many different social spaces.

In addition to his portrayal of an upper-class man who indulges in the material comforts of the public sphere owing to his class, Hugh Whitbread is continuously presented as a character who embodies and maintains the patriarchal system of his society throughout the narrative. In the same vein, his walk in the city conveys the same values he is portrayed to stand for in the novel. In the afternoon Hugh and Richard Dalloway are shown to pass the corner of Bond Street and Brook Street on their way back from lunch at Lady Bruton’s house. The narrative makes clear that they have been invited to help Lady Bruton write a letter to the Times about a project of hers, which aims to support the emigration of “young people of both sexes born

214 of respectable parents, and to set them up with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada” (101). It is seen that Lady Bruton, a strong and formidable woman as described by others such as Clarissa and Richard, calls for help from Hugh when she feels incapable of writing letters to The Times, aware of the “futility of her own womanhood” (102). In this respect, as Fernald argues, Lady Bruton “exemplifies the limits of a woman’s influence on the workings of the classical public sphere” (45). In the patriarchal England of the early years of the twentieth century, where the sexes were still sharply segregated, Lady Bruton needed men to have her letter written in the right way, get it published, and paid attention to. Considering this, it can be claimed that what the narrative tries to reveal is the idea which Richard Dalloway uttered in The Voyage Out: the idea of society as a machine (reminding the reader of Lefebvre’s notions of space as physical and mental constructs) in which different members of society are assigned different spaces and roles. In such a society, men like Hugh Whitbread and Richard Dalloway are the oil of the machine, without which (without their existence and social network) the machine would stop. The system would also fail without their wives who were assigned roles mainly at home. Similarly, the machine could not go on working without soldiers like Septimus risking their lives in the service of the nation or without many civil servants like Peter maintaining the nation’s exploitation of its colonies.

Unlike Hugh’s experience of the city, Richard’s walk in the public sphere is characterized by his acknowledgement of class distinctions. During his walk home from Lady Bruton’s house, Richard observes and reflects on the problems of the public sphere of London such as poverty, prostitution, traffic and cruelty of the police:

He had no illusions about the London police. Indeed, he was collecting evidence of their malpractices; and those costermongers, not allowed to stand their barrows in the streets; and prostitutes, good Lord, the fault wasn’t in them, nor in young men either, but in our detestable social system and so forth . . . crossing the Green Park and observing with pleasure how in the shade of the trees whole families, poor families, were sprawling; children kicking up their legs; sucking milk . . . he was of the opinion that every park

215 and every square, during the summer months should be open to children . . . But what could be done for female vagrants like that poor creature, stretched on her elbow” (108).

However, the fact that he goes on to talk about his own happiness immediately after such caring thoughts points to his lack of genuine interest in the lives of the poor and the marginalized, which, as claimed before, can also be seen in his wife: “It was a great age in which to have lived. Indeed, his own life was a miracle . . . here he was, in the prime of life, walking to his house in Westminster to tell Clarissa that he loved her. Happiness is this, he thought” (109). The narrative makes it clear that what interests Richard is the continuity of tradition and perpetuation of the long-standing systems of the society:

As for Buckingham Palace (like an old prima donna facing the audience all in white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity, he considered, nor despise what does, after all, stand to millions of people (a little crowd was waiting at the gate to see the King drive out) for a symbol, absurd though it is; a child with a box of bricks could have done better, he thought; looking at the memorial to Queen Victoria . . . its white mound, its billowing motherliness; but he liked being ruled by the descendant of Horsa; he liked continuity; and the sense of handing on the traditions of the past. (109)

These lines of his thought about Buckingham Palace are of great importance in that they can be explained through Lefebvre’s understanding of mental space and particularly through Tuan’s ideas (which are quite in line with Lefebvre’s mental space) regarding the educational function of the designed environment. As Tuan claims, in some cultures “the building is the primary text for handing down a tradition, for presenting a view of reality” (112). Richard’s ideas on the palace and his linking it to the idea of passing down the traditions of the past can serve as an example to this idea of Tuan’s, and also shows how human lives and history are reflected in their constructed spaces.

Mapping the walks characters take in London, Larsson asserts that these walks clearly uncover how the representatives of the upper classes such as Clarissa, the official in the government car, Richard and Hugh all move about in the same small area and how their walks take place in each other’s footsteps (122). She also draws

216 attention to the fact that Peter differs from them in his walk, which forms “an arc east of the other characters’ routes, into the parts of London that Woolf always describes in positive terms in her fiction” (122). In addition to this, Peter is also the character whose walks cover the most extensive area, including Westminster, Regent’s Park and Bloomsbury just as his job has taken him overseas for many years, while the other members of Clarissa’s party and class seem to have confined themselves to England. Employing geography to reveal the relations between power, gender and empire in London, Mrs Dalloway renders a subtle critique of British militarism, imperialism and unquestioning patriotism through Peter Walsh’s perambulations through the city.

Having just returned from India, where he has worked as a colonial administer, Peter’s walk in the city (after he leaves Clarissa’s house) is imbued with a series of spatial locations filled with images of Englishness and empire. As he walks up Whitehall, he sees a group of young soldiers in uniform and with guns, marching to the Cenotaph, the central war memorial in London. He goes on walking along Whitehall, a street which embodies governmental power, and which is filled with statues of military heroes. As Thacker claims, the narrative conveys these streets “as sharply masculine in tone, as social space devoted to memorials of war, death, and empire, with grand buildings devoted to public life, such as the Treasury and the Foreign Office” (412). However, the narrative also renders these buildings of national importance and glamour as places which yield different feelings and memories to individuals as well, which, as Thacker believes, shows how physical spaces rely on imaginative conceptualisation, as well as how the human mind is characterized by a constant interaction with external spaces and places (152-153). In this regard, when Peter gets to Trafalgar Square, walking between the statues of military heroes, the narrative quickly turns the nationalistic perception of this public space into a specific geographic place by allowing Peter Walsh to stop in front of the statue of General Gordon and remember him as his childhood hero:

217 . . . all the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as if they too had made the same renunciation . . . all that I’ve been through, he thought, crossing the road, and standing under Gordon’s statue, Gordon whom as a boy he had worshipped; Gordon standing lonely with one leg raised and his arms crossed, - poor Gordon, he thought. (47)

In another example, Peter looks at statues of generals, but what he sees is himself, an administrator of a colonial land, “in the plate-glass window of a motor-car manufacturer . . . All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland” (44). This part of the novel can be explained through Lefebvre’s notion of “ambiguous continuity” (86-87), which makes a social space inherently composite, mixing heterogeneous spaces together in a physical space:

Social spaces interpenetrate one another and/or superimpose themselves upon one another. They are not things, which have mutually limiting boundaries and which collide because of their contours or as a result of inertia . . . Visible boundaries, such as walls or enclosures in general give rise for their part to an appearance of separation between spaces where in fact what exists is an ambiguous continuity. The space of a room, bedroom, house or garden may be cut off in a sense from social space by barriers and walls, by all the signs of private property, yet still remain fundamentally part of that space. (86-87)

As seen in the quotation from the novel, the governmental buildings that Peter sees along Whitehall are linked to the India that he has administered, which clearly points to the heterogeneity and plurality of social space. Therefore, London turns into an imperial space for Peter, behind which far-away India stands. Moreover, Thacker finds this part of the novel quite interesting, relating it to his finding that India also happens to be the first place name to be uttered before the Westminster of Clarissa’s house in the novel (412): “. . . Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which . . .” (Mrs Dalloway 1). Brantlinger relates this to the establishment of the Irish Free State, which happened only a year before the setting of the novel, and which might imply that if Ireland could leave British control, India might do it as well, a change which Leonard Woolf actively supported in his anti-imperialist publications in the 1920s (149-167). Still, this remains a less well-evidenced implication considering the fact that there is only one reference made

218 to Ireland in the novel: when Peter compares the district where he served in India to Ireland in terms of its size: “All India . . . a district twice as big as Ireland” (44). In addition to this weak imagined connection, the fact that Peter has put India “behind him” (44) might be another implication of anti-imperialism in the novel, which is immediately reinforced by Peter’s comments on the young soldiers marching in front of him. He watches a large group of soldiers ordered to lay a wreath on the cenotaph to honour the dead of the war, and sees “on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England” (46). However, the narrative undermines the patriotic atmosphere of this scene when Peter notices that the soldiers “did not look robust. They were weedy for the most part, boys of sixteen, who might, to-morrow, stand behind bowls of rice, cakes of soap on counters” (46). The “life” of the soldiers seems “laid under “a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline” (44). Such a passage clearly demonstrates how the narrative makes use of external geographical locations, and the spatial histories and values attributed to these places to expose the psychology of the characters, and to investigate wider political issues of gender and empire. The narrative further disrupts the nationalistic narrative of war and heroes, when Peter starts walking behind a woman (although not purposefully), objectifying her by making her one with the commodities for sale, and becomes part of the new aesthetics of merchandise even though he frequently denies it throughout the narrative:

. . . he was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties, yellow dressing-gowns, pipes, fishing-rods, in the shop windows; and respectability and evening parties and spruce old men wearing white slips beneath their waistcoats. He was a buccaneer. On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement . . . (49)

219 However, as Snaith claims, when the woman looks, not at him, but past and through him (Mrs Dalloway 49) the scene ends; Peter has already named his actions as partly fantasy, and the male gaze is unable to “erase the woman as flâneuse” (38).

The same walk also reflects Peter’s own insecurity and delusions about himself. Denying his aging and fast flow of years, he insists that he “yet stood at the opening of endless avenues, down which if he chose he might wander” (46). The narrative; however, casts this limitless landscape as an illusion, saying that he is free to escape “(only of course for an hour or so) from precisely what he was . . .” (48). Moreover, although his trip in London means to him a passionate heroism opposed to the conventional and stagnant middle-class way of life, which he associates with the Dalloways who symbolise “a great deal of the public-spirited, British Empire, tariff reform, governing-class spirit” (70), he still wonders whether Hugh or Richard will help him find a job, and returns to the Dalloways’ house in the evening to attend the party, which he has criticised Clarissa for several times. Considering these, it can be claimed that the narrative effectively weaves a complex subtext of insecurity and loss into Peter’s show of bravado, and the nationalistic spirit acted out by the military march he sees, in his walk through London streets.

The narrative sounds more strikingly ironic when Peter Walsh finishes his business at the lawyer’s and starts his journey back to Clarissa’s house. During this walk back towards the more socially and governmentally central parts of London (Westward), Peter watches the things happening around him not only with excitement but also with a regained feeling of familiarity, and he seems to enjoy “his moments of pride in England” (50). Having served in the colonies for a long time, he regards the London he observes now as a “splendid achievement in its own way” (50), and it “seemed dear to him as a personal possession” (50). It becomes exceedingly ironic when the sound of an ambulance bell (which carries the dead body of Septimus, who served Britain in World War I, and committed suicide due to shell shock) inspires Peter to bless the civilization in London:

220 One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the head, struck down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was civilisation. It struck him coming back from the East – the efficiency, the organisation, the communal spirit of London. (141)

This part of the novel clearly demonstrates the paradoxes of what civilisation and imperialism have promised to achieve and what kinds of negative consequences they actually have led to in different individuals’ lives in society, eclipsing their own promises.

In Virginia Woolf (1994), Hanson argues that chronologically taking over where Jacob’s Room left off, in which the major character Jacob was barely visible on the London map and disappeared forever due to World War I, Mrs Dalloway is about those who survived the war (62). In this regard, Septimus is a version of Jacob as a young war veteran, who has returned from the war alive, notwithstanding his psychologically wounded state. Like Jacob, Septimus is portrayed as living in hired rooms in Bloomsbury, and is in Mayfair with his wife Lucrezia only for a day to consult a psychiatrist. Even though he has not acquired the same upper-class education as Jacob, Septimus has grown up in the same cultural mould, which promotes patriarchal and nationalistic values in society. The narrative states that his nationalism which made him want to fight for his country was largely a result of his reading of Shakespeare, and he was

one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. (80)

This quotation clearly demonstrates how the patriarchal and nationalistic ideology is inextricably interwoven, and how they maintain their ideals through spaces, as seen in the association of trenches with manliness. However, this idealized and

221 romanticised picture of the service of men for their country does not last long for Septimus. After the war, he sees the world in a different way and looks at Shakespeare from a different perspective:

Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the intoxication of language -Antony and Cleopatra- had shrivelled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity – the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. (82)

Disillusioned by what he has experienced during the war, Septimus feels alienated from his society, which the narrative reflects with the help of his walk in the city. In this way, through his story the narrative offers a competing discourse which represents what is lost, repressed, or denied by the official London map. Unlike Peter Walsh whose thoughts during his walk show him to remain, mentally, in between his experiences in London and India, Septimus’s thoughts during his walk show him to remain more in the battlefield than in London, for reasons of trauma. In this respect, it can be claimed that his story of duty and sacrifice for his nation and the tragedy of his destruction are played out on London’s streets. Different from other characters, whose attention are quickly drawn to the signs of empire and state while walking on the streets, Septimus seems unconscious of them. Moreover, unlike Clarissa and Elizabeth, who find the city and its crowd exiting and full of opportunities, Septimus regards the city as an intimidating and undifferentiated space, which he had previously enjoyed as a place full of hope and meaning, but no longer. All of these can be explained through Tuan’s ideas that “the world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires, and cramped when it frustrates them” (65). As Tuan says, space becomes a place when it is endowed with particular values, and therefore, gains familiarity. However, when human beings lack the ability to recognize familiar landmarks, as in Septimus’s case (due to his psychological turmoil resulting from his experiences in the war), a familiar place quickly turns to undifferentiated space, and they feel disconnected from both

222 location and meaning. Therefore, whereas Clarissa considers the royal motorcar a symbol of authority and order, Septimus sees a threat in it: “And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought . . . The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames” (12). For him beauty remains “behind a pane of glass” (81), and he finds in his beloved Shakespeare “the intoxication of language” (82). Deprived of his familiar signifiers of beauty and order, he thinks that “it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning” (82).

Rendering Septimus’s experience of the city in a striking way, the narrative cleverly juxtaposes it with the experience of other characters that seem inclined to willingly submit to the spatial codes characterized by dominant ideologies and social hierarchy. For example, when the mysterious car which is believed to be carrying a figure of sovereignty passes by, most of the characters in this scene – the people gathering at the gates of Buckingham Palace, the well-off shoppers on the street or Sir John Buckhurst in his car with a chauffeur – are portrayed as sharing a sense of pride and dignity for their country. In a similar vein, while Miss Pym is showing the mixture of flowers in her shop to Clarissa, they are interrupted by a loud noise, which turns out to come from the same official car outside. In this scene we find Miss Pym immediately apologising to Mrs Dalloway for the sound as if it were her fault that her customer might be disturbed by it, which demonstrates the deeply ingrained class-consciousness of society. The submissiveness that she demonstrates can be seen as another layer of a more general submissiveness held in common with both Clarissa Dalloway and the crowd outside, who are all filled with thoughts on this symbol of authority:

. . . rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority . . . Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? (11)

223 While the people in the street are gripped by excitement at standing near an apparently royal car, Septimus is filled with a feeling of fear of his superiors: “this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him . . . It is I who am blocking the way, he thought” (12). In another, similar, instance, the narrative conveys the speculations of different characters such as Mrs Coates, Mrs Bletchley or Mr Bowley on what is being written on the sky and ironically states that it is quite certain that the aeroplane is on an important mission from West to East, pointing to the nationalistic feelings which might arise among people in this view:

It had gone; it was behind the clouds. There was no sound. The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a mission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed, and yet certainly so it was – a mission of the greatest importance. (18)

However, upon seeing the aeroplane, Septimus is filled with fear, believing that it is there to signal to and threaten him. As seen, while the domineering state power organizes the citizens’ daily lives, grounding it on a centre, it also alienates those who cannot relate to it. For Septimus the city’s drawing everything to a centre means disaster, which might imply the way nationalism has led to war. Therefore, while Clarissa, Peter, and Elizabeth variously celebrate the bustling streets and parks of London, for those like Septimus and Lucrezia these streets are nightmarish landscapes of past horrors and future hopelessness.

Even though Septimus finally commits suicide, it is observed that a constant struggle goes on inside him between lust for life and yearning for death. Looking through his window in his room in Bloomsbury, ready to throw himself out of it, he thinks, “But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The Sun hot. Only human beings?” (139). He seems to end his life in an act of defiance and rebellion against the representatives of society who want him to act in line with their ideals: “‘I’ll give it you!’ he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down

224 on to Mrs Filmer’s area railings” when doctor Holmes grabs the door handle and enters the room against his wishes” (140). Here we see the novel’s treatment of how ordinary and previously patriotic people are devastatingly effected by war and also by humiliating and inhuman treatment by authority figures such as the two doctors, Dr Holmes and Bradshaw, who serve as mouthpieces for the dominant discourses of society. Throughout the novel these two doctors are portrayed as constantly reinforcing official definitions of normalcy and sanity. Dr Bradshaw, the representative of the medical system, accomplishes these by promoting “proportion” and “conversion”, values which he finds vital not only for maintaining the health of an individual, but also for the collective health of the nation:

Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion–his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son) . . . (92)

His practice of dealing with mental patients, which is to send them to a place (a mental institution, which can be considered in line with Foucault’s ideas of disciplinary space such as prisons, hospitals and schools aiming at controlling members of a society) in Surrey to be taught a sense of this proportion, is conveyed in this way:

If they failed, he had to support him police and the good of society, which, he remarked very quietly, would take care, down in Surrey, that these unsocial impulses, bred more than anything by the lack of good blood, were held in control. And then stole out from her hiding-place and mounted her throne that Goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up. (94-95)

As seen in the last evocative sentence, Bradshaw, as a representative of dominant social forces, not only literally confines people, but he imprisons them in a paradigm of normalcy, which ideologically supports the nation and empire, and also silences them. His further description of “Conversion” as a goddess who is “even now

225 engaged in – the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London . . . in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance” (93) shows how these terms of conversion and proportion act as fundamental pillars of society promoting health, self-sacrifice, duty and glory for the empire, and developing the power of the state through a number of signs such as the commemorative statues and official buildings of national importance.

As seen so far, the London landscape in Mrs Dalloway is brimming with geographic spaces that are occupied (mainly as a result of the existence of such dichotomies as private and public, and ordinary and sacred governing society) and experienced differently by women and men, by the poor and wealthy and the foreign and native. The narrative, nevertheless, attempts to create a liminal geographic space that, to some extent, transcends boundaries and achieve connections among characters who normally inhabit distinct places, through Clarissa’s party. Here characters from different walks of life come together (even though most of them seem middle class at the lowest or upper-middle class, which may indicate that Clarissa’s desire to merge different worlds and create a feeling of unity and integration is horizontal, not that much vertical (Zwerdling, “Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System” 73)) and Clarissa even feels an overwhelming connection with Septimus – whom she has never met – after she learns about his suicide, and she also feels distressed seeing a solitary old woman getting ready for bed in the house across the street as if the woman were a reflection of her own old age (Groover 1). However, before talking about these important moments of connection for Clarissa, it will be better to analyse how Clarissa feels about her parties and what they mean to her.

Analysing whether Clarissa’s party achieves real connections and unity among characters with different worlds and backgrounds, Tseng initially points to the importance of parties in Woolf’s life by referring to Leonard Woolf’s biography and Woolf’s diary entries (239). Leonard Woolf states of Virginia Woolf that “the idea of a party always excited her” (98) as she found parties to be occasions in which

226 people communicated, intermingled, and experienced a sense of sharing and togetherness. In her diary entry, Woolf herself talks about what she calls “the party consciousness”, which she describes as a state “where people secrete an envelope which connects them and protects them from others . . . You must not break it . . . You must keep it up—conspire together” (A Writer’s Diary 74). In this respect, it can be claimed that what Clarissa claims as her purpose in arranging these parties bears strong affinities with what Virginia Woolf writes about parties in her diary. Even though Peter and her husband Richard belittle the social rituals and parties that fill Clarissa’s daily life, Clarissa believes in their importance to unite people in their fight against the hardships of living: “let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow prisoners” (71-72). Making these people come together, in fact, comprises her philosophy of life, which she finds meaningless when individuals do not connect:

. . . what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was so-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create . . . (114)

It is important to note in these lines how Clarissa highlights the categorization of and disconnections between people through spatial pointers, which anticipates Lefebvre’s and Tuan’s understanding of places as human constructs embodying different values. The narrative also depicts her desire to connect even with people outside her social class as authentic: “She made her drawing-room a sort of meeting- place; she had a genius for it . . . odd unexpected people turned up; an artist sometimes; sometimes a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere. . . she did it genuinely, from a natural instinct” (71). As the narrative states in these lines, Clarissa’s party indeed becomes a meeting place when different city-walkers of the day end up in it at night. Making his way to Clarissa’s house reluctantly, Peter refers to this characteristic of her party when he imagines the swarms of people he sees as being drawn to Clarissa’s house:

227 Everybody was going out . . . it seemed as if the whole of London were embarking in little boats moored to the bank, tossing on the waters, as if the whole place were floating off in carnival . . . cabs were rushing round the corner, like water round the piers of a bridge, drawn together, it seemed to him because they bore people going to her party . . . (164)

This gathering of the everyday city dwellers and travellers with different backgrounds at Clarissa’s house towards the end of the novel physically creates a somewhat reconfigured domestic space that enables blurring of the sharp boundaries drawn between individuals of different gender and standings as well as of multiplicities of perspectives. The party clearly serves as an occasion in which somewhat socially separated city dwellers can communicate and intermingle. In this regard, Tseng also considers Clarissa’s house, where the party is held, “the common end of the city-walkers’ disparate routes of flanerie”, and therefore, regards the party as “a transgression of the class and gender boundaries domestic space signifies, and thereby of social stratification” (31-32). In contrast to Lady Bruton’s party, to which Clarissa has not been invited (26), Clarissa’s party includes a greater diversity of guests, such as those “dull” and poor acquaintances such as Mrs Marsham and Ellie Henderson (even though it is unclear whether Clarissa invited Ellie Henderson, whom she had not asked in the first place, but whom Mrs Marsham asked whether she would like to come (109), which made Clarissa angry) whom she repeatedly calls “little things” (119), those who wandered in like Peter and felt distressed upon hearing “the direct downright sound of Big Ben” (44), and those like Hugh who enjoyed the genial and fraternal sound of “a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street” (95).

In such an atmosphere of heterogeneity, the party allows voices of the marginalized members of the society to be heard, and to some extent, challenges the official forces ruling the city. For instance, shabbily dressed Ellie Henderson, upon seeing the Prime Minister, the “symbol” of “English society” (161), thinks that he appears to be an “ordinary”, “poor chap” who might have stood behind a counter buying biscuits (161). The narrative in this part insistently continues the portrayal of the Prime Minister as an ordinary man: “He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to

228 watch. Nobody looked at him. They just went on talking, yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society” (161). In this respect, it is also important to remember the beginning of the party in which the presence and identity of the Prime Minister is devalued by a servant, as discussed in the previous chapter of this study. In another example of this type, Sally Seton and Peter, who are united in their dislike of and criticisms against the British middle-classes, think that the Bradshaws who, belonging to the middle-class, stand for the morality of their society are actually “damnable humbugs” (181). As seen in these instances, Clarissa’s party acts as a challenge to the disciplining and domineering forces of the city by bringing disparate groups of people together in the same place and initiating flows of conversations which allow for divergence of views. Switching its focalization on different party guests, both present and imagined, constantly, the narrative renders a picture of an ideal community which encompasses the perceptions of all, even the perceptions of those such as Ellie Henderson or Mrs Marsham whom Clarissa finds dull and hard to tolerate. In this way, the middle-class home is no longer a mostly privatized feminine domestic space, but an un-delimited social space accepting pedestrians of everyday life in London (even though it seems mostly those from middle or upper- middle class as mentioned before), which can be explained through what Lefebvre names “differential space” or “a space that is other” (391), which negates abstract and totalizing spatial constructions by “accentuat[ing] differences” (52) and making space “liable to be eroticized and restored to ambiguity, to the common birthplace of needs and desires, by means of music, by means of differential systems and valorizations . . .” (391). Stripped of its usual functions of exclusive social interaction and display of taste among middle and upper class members of society, the party enacts a vision of all-encompassing communality by giving voice to different ideas of the somewhat marginalized members of the party and society, which Clarissa herself sees:

Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that everyone was unreal in one way; much more real in another.

229 It was, she thought, partly their clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the background, it was possible to say things you couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper. (159-160)

The implication in these lines is the interrelatedness of all things, people and places in the world. This idea is singled out in several parts of the narrative, one of whose most striking expression can be found in the part which talks about Clarissa’s theory in her youth that there might exist a different kind of temporal pattern which may enable her to continue after death:

But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that . . . The unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death. (143)

Clarissa’s account of the way different selves might survive in other people and places summons an image of the self and space not existing in a pattern, but continuously mobile and heterogeneous as Lefebvre believes social space to be.

As seen, even though characters with different backgrounds come together in Clarissa’s party, they cannot really transcend the social boundaries that have been created among them by dominant social systems. In fact, the only time that the party achieves the unity and understanding among people happens when the Bradshaws announce Septimus’s death. Upon hearing the news, Clarissa is initially shattered, thinking that it ruins her party, and withdraws into an empty room: “Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death . . . The party’s splendour fell to the floor (172). However, after this brief moment of the shocking news, Clarissa gradually starts to contemplate Septimus’s death and imagines it as if she experiences it: “Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident . . . He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it” (172). It

230 is important to note here that, throughout the party day Clarissa and Septimus have been separated not only by different segments of narrative in the novel, but mostly by their social class in the world of the story, and therefore, by the places they wander in London. As Larsson claims, the routes they take in the city only converge “at the corner where Bond Street and Brook Street cross” (109), which is the location of the shop at which Clarissa usually buys her flowers and which is the place Septimus and Lucrezia stop on their walk towards Harley Street for their appointment with the psychiatrist Dr Bradshaw at 12 o’clock. Clarissa walks no further from this point, and after buying her flowers, she turns around, walking directly back home to get prepared for her party. Septimus and Lucrezia, on the other hand, walk back, in the opposite direction, after their stop at exactly the same corner. Some critics such as Leaska (112) and Squier (95) have seen this convergence as an implication of Septimus being a part of Clarissa, of being her alter ego. Another critic Molly Hoff proposes that the relationship between them can be likened to the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff in Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: like Catherine, Clarissa might stand for the socialised aspect of humanity while Septimus, like Heathcliff, might embody what is wild and unregulated (2). It is perhaps better to regard this as an indication that Septimus plays no part in Clarissa’s world, as scholars such as Wendy Williams claims (210). As another scholar Larsson argues, even though he may be Clarissa’s double, he still has no place in the world that she moves in, which can be seen in their routes in a London map (129):

Neither she nor the men belonging to the circle in which she has chosen to live her life, Richard and Hugh, walk beyond the point where Septimus is introduced in the novel, where Bond Street and Brook Street cross. The fact that Peter wandered off to the same area as Septimus may rather be considered proof of his ‘buccaneering’, poor judgement and lack of discipline. In the evening he again submits to the order of things. At the end of Mrs. Dalloway, everybody, apart from those who have refused to adapt, Septimus Warren Smith and Miss Kilman, can be found in Westminster, in the home of the Dalloways.

Despite the facts that Clarissa and Septimus wandered the London streets without encountering each other on this London day, and they are separated by boundaries

231 drawn between them regarding their class, Septimus’s death once more triggers the fear of death that Clarissa felt in the morning, thereby connecting them after his death. She empathizes with Septimus in his choice of suicide, thinking that had it not been for Richard, she could have been dead as well, due to the hardships of living:

Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another, she must have perished (185).

In the all-encompassing party that she holds, Clarissa experiences a mystical union with Septimus that enables her both to feel his death in her own body and understand what he means by killing himself. She regards Septimus’s death as a way to communicate to others and make himself heard:

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life . . . This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically evaded them; closeness drew apart, rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. (173)

It is quite striking that immediately after these lines, she goes on thinking about men like Dr Bradshaw (Septimus’s doctor) who make life “intolerable” by forcing people’s souls, and whom she finds “evil” for this reason (173). It is as if in her mystical unity with Septimus she has discovered the reason why Septimus decided to kill himself at the last minute when he saw Dr Bradshaw opening the door of his room to take him to an isolated life in a hospital. It is her identification, sympathy and unity with Septimus that, in the end, makes her embrace her own life again, even though she states that “she felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away . . . He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter” (174). It is also important to say that this scene of identification with Septimus is closely interwoven with Clarissa’s view of her old

232 neighbour – the old woman across the street whose continuous presence and distance made Clarissa say earlier, “that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery . . . here was one room; there another” (119). Immediately following her unity with Septimus, Clarissa is shown as achieving unity with her old neighbour as well, who finally “stared straight at her!” (174), which erased the distance (with which she was concerned) that hindered the miracle of connection between her and the old lady.

Critics have considered these scenes in which Clarissa feels connected with Septimus in various ways. A number of critics such as Natania Rosenfeld have understood Clarissa’s identification with Septimus as inauthentic, claiming that since Mrs Dalloway is mainly about class division, Clarissa’s notion of a mystical connection with others that erases class boundaries is a “fraudulent egalitarianism” which she comes up with to comfort and justify herself (147). Deborah Guth also considers Clarissa’s connection with Septimus to be “spurious” (20), an “exercise in wish fulfilment” (24). However, other critics such as Turner have focused on what Clarissa’s unity with Septimus might imply and how it can contribute to the readers, rather than on whether it is fake or real (134). As Turner says, even though Clarissa’s identification with Septimus in her party is a “performance”, similar to a theatrical performance, religious ritual or carnival, rather than a fact, it still suggests the possibility of change for society, which could erase its sharp boundaries drawn among people of different gender, class or nationality and put an end to the suffering, alienation and insensitiveness even if it happens only momentarily in the narrative. Ultimately, by bringing people with different social standings and characteristics together in her assigned space of home, Clarissa shows the reality of existing together, the interdependence of people on each other, the constructed, heterogeneous, dynamic and flexible nature of space, and the need for reconfiguring it.

In conclusion, analyses carried out in this section of Chapter 4 of the dissertation demonstrate that Mrs Dalloway constructs its characters, their stories and the various places they wander in public spaces of London in a politically conscious way. Place,

233 time, gender, class and nationality form the conditions of living that these characters have to deal with in the narrative. Placed in the streets of London, characters are given differing opportunities or obstacles, mainly depending on their gender, class and nationality. London is portrayed as imbued with spaces that are occupied differently by women and men, and the wealthy and the poor, and that reinforce binaries such as public and private, sacred and ordinary, and past and present. However, the narrative does not offer these places with boundaries as static, absolute, unchangeable and homogeneous. It emphasizes their dynamic, heterogeneous and changing character instead, anticipating Lefebvre’s idea of social space as the space which is experienced and, therefore, can be changed by the individual, as well as Tuan’s idea that places are spaces that are endowed with human meaning, and, therefore, can be reconfigured with a meaning that an individual experience provides. Therefore, it can be maintained that Mrs Dalloway embraces an understanding of place and space which is closely tied to individual perception, and allows them to interact, unite or differentiate. The novel particularly achieves such an understanding of space by a number of walks taken by a variety of characters in the landscape of London. In each one of these walks London and its places are perceived and experienced differently depending on the characters’ gender, class, nationality, and the different subjective concerns or attitudes that arise from these factors. Moreover, the novel also creates a brief and partially liminal space that, to some extent, transcends boundaries and achieve connections particularly between two of its characters that normally inhabit distinct places. People from different walks of life come together in the festival space of Clarissa’s party, and they are given the chance to express themselves in the same place. The only true moment of transcending boundaries happens in this party when Clarissa feels an overwhelming connection with Septimus when she learns about his suicide, and when she feels a connection with a solitary old woman getting ready for bed in the house across the street following the old woman’s momentary gaze.

234

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

This dissertation attempted to explore representations of space and place in some of Virginia Woolf’s novels, being The Voyage Out (1915), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Years (1937). It demonstrated how these novels make references to social and historical contexts of their era, through a particular focus on representations of space and place; this is an area of investigation that has been frequently ignored by scholarly criticism of modernist texts that has predominantly taken an inward emphasis. Considering the importance of spatial criticism in enabling new readings and fresher insights into literary texts, this study and its results suggest that approaching modernism – and one of its best representatives, Virginia Woolf – from the perspective of spatial criticism is a productive way of demonstrating and analysing the hallmark of modernism, which is general breakdown of forms, old hierarchies and so-called truths. Since late nineteenth- century and early twentieth-century Modernity was a period characterized by a radical questioning of traditional ways of perceiving and interacting with the world, and since physical and social time started to be differentiated as part of this rethinking, the long-standing belief of space as an absolute and fixed entity was unsettled with new notions of a changing relative space. In this respect, this dissertation has shown that Virginia Woolf explores these new perceptions, and spatializes her politics (foregrounding the traditionally- ignored notion of space in individuals’ lives and fiction), conveying her criticisms of patriarchal, class- stratified, nationalist and imperialist social systems through representations of space and place in her novels, and it has further shown that such representations bear strong

235 affinities with the ideas of three later theorists of space and place. These are Henri Lefebvre, who basically regards social spaces as socially, historically and ideologically constructed, subjective, multiple, dynamic and full of conflicts, Yi-Fu Tuan, who draws attention to the concepts of space and place in their relation to human beings, and Gaston Bachelard, who attributes particularly the house with certain fixed characteristics, which can also be witnessed in the rigid construction of physical and mental space by the status quo.

The thesis mainly adopts Lefebvre’s understanding of space which consists of three interrelated spatial concepts (in contrast to the traditional understanding of space as only being physical): physical space, mental space, and social space. An important finding of this study is that the notion of social space when investigated in these novels unveils multiple and heterogeneous spatial experiences and perceptions, which differ for individuals in line with time and distance as well as between individuals with respect to their gender, class and nationality. Space is not static, neutral or objectified in these novels, but it is made up of relationships, and its meanings may vary with regard to its perceivers or occupiers. Such a reading of these novels; however, does not mean that these novels adopt an understanding of space and place that is fully in line with ideas of Lefebvre and Tuan. Acknowledging the existence of the traditional understanding of space, this study claims that critically revealing a suppressive power system whose ideologies are manifested and reproduced by conventional codes of thought on physical and mental space, these novels also yield an alternative and expanded understanding of space, which is heterogeneous, dynamic and open to change, preparing the way to rejuvenate gender, class, and national identities, social relations, and human geography. However, they do not additionally engage in representing or indicating a complete picture of an improved society in terms of ways of living and occupying space.

As discussed in the first chapter of this dissertation, there is an increasing interest in spatial studies conducted on Woolf’s works. However, these studies are quite limited in that they are specifically conducted on some of her essays, diaries, and well-

236 known stories and novels, and with a particular focus on the use of spaces and places in terms of gender, which has been linked to Woolf’s attempts to liberate women from their narrowly circumstanced lives. This dissertation provides a more comprehensive analysis of Woolf’s representations of spaces and places by studying four of her novels in terms of their critique of the patriarchal, class-stratified and imperialist social systems, in the light of three spatial theorists with their differing focuses on space and place.

To briefly review the findings of this dissertation, all these novels were found to reveal a constant preoccupation with physical and mental spaces that are attributed with certain spatial codes serving the powerful ideologies of their society and time, even though they differ in their focus of criticism, emphasis, and treatment. Each subsection of the two analytical chapters in this study investigated the representations of domestic or public space by focusing on constructions of these spheres by different dominant social systems, and each found differing treatments of these constructions.

The first section of the first analytical chapter found out that The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years underline the fact that the physical and mental separation of private or domestic space and public space served as the basis for sustaining the dominant patriarchal order of late Victorian and Edwardian English society. They reveal patriarchally-promoted ideological characteristics attached to domestic space such as femininity, comfort, order, stability and fixity, which can be considered in accordance with the essentializing ideas of Bachelard.

Notwithstanding all these representations of domestic space as constructed by patriarchy, anticipating Lefebvre and acknowledging that the discourse of domestic space is merely a social and cultural construction imposed by the dominant social order, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years also disrupt such associations attached to the domestic sphere, and render it as consisting not only of physical and mental space but also of social space, which is heterogeneous, dynamic and open to change. In this respect, as affirmed by examples analysed in this thesis, they defy the

237 association of domestic space with femininity and comfort for its occupiers in a number of ways. The most striking of these involve conveying the female characters’ feelings of confinement and discomfort at home and showing that domestic space is inseparable from the social and economic concerns of public space (which echoes Lefebvre’s ideas regarding the interconnectedness of spaces, and unsettles the sharp distinctions drawn in other discourses between private and public space).

What also comes to the fore from further investigations into The Years and (particularly) To the Lighthouse is that these additionally undermine other patriarchal constructions and the attributes attached to domestic space. Important among these are assumptions that domestic space is stable, ordered, and homogenous, ideas that are refuted by the novels’ demonstrations that domestic space is exposed to the flow and fluidity of time, that social and cultural change is inescapable, and that its meanings are plural owing to the variousness and variability of individuals’ perspectives. A critical conclusion of this part is that Woolf rejects the idea of fixity, not only as attached to the understanding of space but also as attached to individuals, as can be particularly observed in The Years in which some characters end up living in a way which is quite different from the ways of living of their childhood; these ideas directly contradict Bachelard’s construction of the childhood house as a place which has inscribed within us a hierarchy and an unchanging system of inhabiting a place, and thereby a certain way of living (Bachelard 15).

The close investigation pursued into Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years in the second section of the first analytical chapter concluded that these novels do not bring to fore the class issue as frequently as they do gender-related issues; however, they still critically convey unequal power relations between different classes within domestic space, in different ways: such as through descriptions of the rooms given to lower class members of bourgeois households and of the treatment of these servants by their employers, which strikingly reveals the middle or upper class psyche as dismissing the existence of the working class and their labour, and

238 as disregarding the significant role the working class has in producing the space of the home, which Lefebvre calls the fetishization of space.

Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse destabilize the seemingly rigid structure of class relations at home to some extent, by unveiling, appreciating and celebrating the obscured practices of lower class members in the domestic sphere, by critically pointing to the tensions and conflicts these divisions create between classes, and by reflecting the working-class viewpoint with some reference to their perceptions of the upper classes. However, it can be concluded that these novels do not make use of the Lefebvrian understanding of language as a kind of space in which a person may take a position and express herself/himself in reflecting the working-class viewpoint as much as they do in their treatment of gender issues. Except for scenes such as Miss Kilman criticizing upper-class ladies, a servant devaluing the presence of the Prime Minister in Clarissa’s party, and a working-class veteran Septimus and his lonely Italian wife Lucrezia criticizing the suppressive class system of the British society in Mrs Dalloway, the lower classes are not given much space to express themselves, which can be interpreted as these novels’ particular focus of interest in conveying their critique of patriarchy.

The Years, on the other hand, attempts to challenge the traditional construction of the domestic sphere regarding class by demonstrating the changes that were happening in the domestic living spaces of British society. Critically exposing how notions of the Victorian middle-class home and its association with nation were constituted by the desire to keep the lower-class, racial and colonial other away, The Years questions them through reflecting spatial changes in England from the late Victorian era to the 1930s as it affected domestic spaces, including references to class-related moves from rural to urban areas (or between these areas), and showing the move from single family houses in respectable districts of London and Oxford to flats or rented rooms in less respectable areas. In spite of some instances of appreciation of their new liberty shown by Sara, Maggie, Delia and Eleanor, characters do not completely welcome or gladly adapt to the new ways of living in

239 flats or rented rooms in close proximity with lower classes. It can be claimed that those female members of families who are forced to live in poor urban districts due to their economic conditions do not seem to attach as much importance to the problems arising from class segregation in their society as they do to problems stemming from gender discrimination, which may be related to the class ideology instilled in them by their middle-class upbringing. It is also here important to talk about the working-class Crosby whose move to a flat is presented as a matter of hardship and sadness, rather than being welcomed by her in terms of her autonomy. She is shown to cling to objects discarded by her old employers, to continue to worship one of the younger sons of the family, and to want to return to her past living conditions (in spite of their hardship). Through this, the novel may be suggesting that such class-based ways of living and spatialization are so deeply ingrained in members of the British society that it is only though changing people’s perceptions of themselves and others that a better society can be created for all, a similar idea to that is uttered by Hewet in The Voyage Out regarding women: “. . . women, even well-educated . . . They see us three times as big as we are . . . For that reason, I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote” (233).

What comes to the fore from the discussions and examinations made in the last section of the first analytical chapter is that The Voyage Out and The Years, novels produced with twenty-two years between them, are also particularly concerned with the notion of domestic space with respect to issues of nationality, showing that this was a connection that continued to occupy Woolf’s mind and that was used as the source of a trope in her writings, almost allegorically. The novels allude to the widespread British analogy between home and nation, and their perception as places of security, morality and superiority. However, they also suggest the subjectivity, and therefore the falsity, of such perceptions and attitudes by drawing attention to the constructed nature of space and by emphasizing the idea of the interconnectedness and interdependence of spaces, which challenges nationalistic constructs of a home/nation as a self-sustaining and autonomous and superior place. It has been observed that several British characters such as Rachel, Helen and Hewet

240 in The Voyage Out and Eleanor and North in The Years convey positive experiences outside the nation (or house), juxtaposing them with problems such as violence, gender discrimination, class strife, urbanization, and alienation inside it, even though these positive experiences are not described in any detail within the novels and do not offer radical alternative representations of the foreign lands or other. Another significant finding in this part is that except for Lucrezia in Mrs Dalloway none of the selected four novels by Woolf give foreign characters the opportunity to express their ideas about England or their homeland. Therefore, as in giving the lower class characters only a small space in which to express themselves in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, these novels seem quite limited in portraying the perceptions of foreign characters regarding their ways of living in their own nations or in England. This may be due to the fact that Woolf wanted to write about things she knew more about, an inclination that can be witnessed in her contemporaries as well. As a woman coming from an upper-middle class family, Woolf directly only experienced the limitations and restrictions surrounding the lives of middle or upper-middle class women in her society. This may explain the indifferent attitude she has towards issues arising from class or nationality in her society.

The first section of Chapter 4 investigates The Voyage Out in its representations of public spaces of London that are directly presented only in the initial pages of the novel. This investigation revealed how London and its conventions of living continue to affect the attitudes and behaviour of the characters even after a great deal of time and space separates the characters from the city. The narrative was found also to contrast how spaces in London and Santa Marina were constructed and how they organized the lives of their inhabitants, implying a merging of the inside and outside in Santa Marina’s spaces, that resembles a Bakhtinian carnivalization. Another significant point is that the novel questions the existing order of the British society by locating its characters outside that order in Santa Marina (through a ship voyage) and by continuously oscillating between these two different ways of living and spatialization, giving the characters the opportunity of taking a critical distance towards London. This corresponds to Tuan’s ideas of modern tools and machines

241 such as bicycles or cars as enlarging human beings’ sense of space (53). However, the analysis of this novel also brought forth the significant fact that Rachel is not given the opportunity to reconstruct the spaces of London in ways that free them from the practices of the dominant social systems. The narrative also never envisions alternative ways of living or an alternative living space either in London or in the native village in Santa Marina where the natives are kept silent and never imagine a future outside of their current colonial conditions, which makes the dark picture that London conveyed particularly at the beginning of the novel even darker, and negates implications of the promising outcomes of the voyage out.

The ship in the novel has been regarded as the embodiment of a kind of heterotopia especially at the beginning of the journey, when it is described as moving by its own power and when characters’ are shown to feel totally cut off from the rest of the world and its domineering social systems. In this way it becomes a cultural and discursive space that is transforming, incompatible and contradictory. Still, it cannot be taken as a complete and enduring heterotopia, for even on board the characters soon establish social space and relations that perpetuate the social system they had in London. Considering such an oscillating mood of the narrative, it can be concluded that the narrative never portrays any spacially-related circumstances as stable, which points to the parallel attitude it takes towards things, people and life, which are also shown to be unstable, dynamic, multiple and characterized by change.

What comes to the fore from the investigations carried out in Mrs Dalloway in the second section of Chapter 4 is that London is a dynamic space of opposing politics as can be seen in the juxtaposition of the strokes of the Palace of Westminster’s clock tower, Big Ben, and the sound of another Westminster clock, that of St. Margaret’s Church (the official church of the House of Commons since 1614). Moreover, each walk taken by different characters in London yields a unique experience of the city and its places depending on the perceiver’s gender, class, nationality, and the attitudes or concerns that stem from these factors. London conveyed through differing perceptions of various characters is just as alive, fragmented and dynamic

242 as a human being and can be thus regarded as the major protagonist of the narrative, which shows the important role space and place plays in Woolf’s fiction.

Another significant claim of this section is that despite Clarissa’s party acting as a differential space which creates a partial vision of all-encompassing communality, the analysis showed that, once again, the novel does not allow its spaces or characters to transcend conventional social (that is, class) boundaries. In fact, the only time that something approaching true unity and understanding between characters of different classes or ages is when Clarissa experiences a momentary sense of connection with the dead Septimus. Metaphorically, this indicates that it is only Septimus’s death that can erase the human and social distance between characters of different class, gender and experience. In this respect, the implication of Septimus’s death can be likened to Rachel’s death in The Voyage Out in that these two victims of society are not given the chance to live their spaces in ways they desire. Still, their deaths yield different implications. In Rachel’s case, it can be maintained that her death allows her escape from the patriarchy. However, since she is given a sudden death and it is not a wilful one as is the case with that of Septimus, she cannot communicate herself to others. Rachel’s death being a defeat of communication, there is no hope that Woolf’s early beginnings of representing a social and political consciousness in this young character will be communicated to others, they die with her. Therefore, it can be said that the dark picture of London is prolonged in this first novel. On the other hand, Septimus escapes his apparently already-determined fate of living in a prison- like hospital through his wilful death, which he chooses in an act of defiance and rebellion. In this regard, Clarissa’s momentary flash of understanding of Septimus may be seen as a positive indication in that Septimus can communicate himself through his death, as Clarissa says. Even if death is the end for him, he is at least given the opportunity to express his alienation through his death to Clarissa, which can be regarded as a positive change of tone in Woolf’s fiction. After this moment of understanding, Clarissa experiences another kind of connection with a solitary old woman living across from her house, leading to her emotional and empathetic acknowledgement of a common human experience of solitude. Thus, Clarissa’s

243 feeling of connection with Septimus and the old woman can still be taken as a suggestion of the possibility of change for society, which could negate its sharp boundaries drawn between people of different gender, class or nationality and end the suffering, alienation and insensitiveness among people arising from these boundaries.

To conclude, The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Years demonstrate a keen sense of the constructedness and changeability of self, time, space, and social relations as can be explained through their representations of an era that witnessed epistemological, physical, and psychological changes in spatio- temporal perspectives and experiences. Space and place in these novels play an important role in conveying critiques of the patriarchal, class-stratified, and imperial social system of the society rather than merely serving as background or setting for events. Organized into two separate chapters of comprehensive analyses of representations of private/domestic and public space respectively (without being a victim of a narrow understanding of private/public or inner/outer spatial codes of division by acknowledging what Lefebvre termed the “ambiguous continuity” of spaces), this dissertation has demonstrated how the representations of different spaces such as drawing rooms, houses, streets, parks, monuments and public institutions in these novels are used in the novels to challenge the established and conventional spatial codes and practices that functioned to maintain gender, class and imperialist hegemonies. As this study has shown, domestic spaces in these novels are multifaceted social spaces consisting of suppression, resistance and conflicts between different genders and classes. In the same vein, the critical renderings of public space in these novels unveil a socio-spatial system that eradicates individuality in the name of manliness and well-being for the whole, while serving to raise individuals who serve patriarchy, the class system and imperialism. In this way, these novels severely question the construction of the public sphere as a place of emancipation and fulfilment, implying the need for a complete change of mindset in society if better ways of living are expected for women, the lower class or the foreign other.

244 One of the most important findings of this dissertation, and perhaps what reveals one of Woolf’s novels’ limitations, is that such an insight into space and place as heterogeneous, multiple, dynamic and alterable in these novels forces interpretation and criticism to build upon the ways of living or spatialization that are represented in the novel. Neither the theories referred to, nor the novels that have been analysed with respect to them in this thesis, show or envision alternative and radical representations of either private or public space in any country, with the exception of a few brief transformative chronotopes (such as the two forest scenes in The Voyage Out or the party scene in Mrs Dalloway), possibly triggered by what Woolf calls epiphanic “moments of being” in which characters are shown to transcend the socially imposed self and embrace new visions of flexible, open, and changing selfhood and relationships. In this respect, fulfilling its aim of being suggestive rather than conclusive, this dissertation lays bare the need to conduct more studies on Woolf’s fiction regarding whether more radical pictures of spatialization regarding gender, class and nationality can be found. Another limitation of this study, which can actually be considered more as a suggestion of another area of study, is that its aim and scope have not allowed it to explore the close relationship between space, time and body (as suggested by Lefebvre and Tuan) comprehensively, implications of which may benefit scholarship on modernist novels.

Despite these shortcomings that mainly result from being restricted to the boundaries of its aims and selected novels, this dissertation enables us to recognize and celebrate the wealth of Woolf’s fiction concerning its spatially-oriented critical strategies with respect to the patriarchy (particularly), class-based system and imperialism of the depicted society, and the fragmented and dynamic spirit that Woolf’s art adopts towards self, time, space and social relations, which embraces plurality. Perhaps, more importantly, by adopting spatial criticism in analysing novels which have already been widely investigated in different ways, this study yields a new multi- perspectival view of literature and cultural activities, relations and life, granting us a richer understanding of the complexity of the global spaces and lives we inhabit today.

245

REFERENCES

Adams, David. “Shadows of a ‘Silver Globe’: Woolf’s Reconfiguration of the Darkness.” Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. 177-218. Print.

Alter, Robert. Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel. Yale University Press, 2005. JSTOR. Web. 14 Feb. 2020.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London, 1991. Print.

Ardoin, Nicole M. “Toward an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Place: Lessons for Environmental Education.” Canadian Journal of Environmental Education (CJEE) 11.1 (2009): 112-126. Print.

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. Print.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by MM Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Print.

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Vol. 1. Suffolk: Triad/Granada, 1982. Print.

Borden, Iain, and Jane Rendell. Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories. Psychology Press, 2000. Print.

246

Bradshaw, David. “The Socio-political Vision of the Novels.” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Sellers. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010. Print.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “The Bloomsbury Fraction versus War and Empire.” Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature. Ed. Carola M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Print.

Bulson, Eric. Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000, New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California P, 1997. Print.

Childs, Peter. Modernism and the Post-Colonial: Literature and Empire 1885–1930. London: Continuum, 2007. Print.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness & Other Stories. Wordsworth Classics, 1999. Print.

Crang, Mike, and Nigel J. Thrift. Thinking Space. Vol. 9. Psychology Press, 2000. Print.

Daiches, David. The Novel and the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Print.

Derisi, Stephanie. “Housing Identity: Re-constructing Feminine Spaces through Memory in Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.” Florida Atlantic University, 2012. Print.

Domancich, Georgina. “Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: Clarissa Dalloway and The Spatial Reading of Literature.” University of La Laguna, 2015. Print.

Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Print.

247

Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. Primitive Classification. New York, 1970. Print.

Einstein, Albert. Relativity. Einstein Reference Archive. New York, 1961. 9-10. Print.

Eliot, Thomas S. “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary.” Horizon. May 1941.

Fernald, Anne E. Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

Fleishman, Avrom. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books: New York, 1995. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1, 1986. 22-27. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “Questions on Geography.” Power and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. C. Gordon, 1980. 63-77. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. London and New York: Routlege, 2003. Print.

Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts.” The Sewanee Review 53.2 (1945): 221-240. JSTOR. Web. 10 January 2019.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Virginia Woolf’s Pedagogical Scenes of Reading: The Voyage Out, The Common Reader, and Her ‘Common Readers.’” Modern Fiction Studies 38: 1 (Spring 1992): 101-25. Print.

248 Froula, Christine. “Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out.” Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993. Print.

Gan, Wendy. “Solitude and Community: Virginia Woolf, Spatial Privacy and A Room of One’s Own.” University of Honkong, 2009. Print.

Gavin, Adrienne, and Andrew Humphries. Ed. Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840-1940. Springer, 2016. Print.

Glendinning, Miles. “Architecture and Public Spaces of Modernism.” The Cambridge History of Modernism. Ed. Vincent Sherry. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Print.

Goldman, Jane. “Modernist Studies.” Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies. Ed. Anna Snaith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.

Grbin, Miloje. “Foucault and Space.” Sociološki Pregled 49.3 (2015): 305-312. Print.

Groover, Kristina. “Taking the Doors off the Hinges: Liminal Space in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London. 6.1, 2008. Print.

Guth, Deborah. “‘What a lark! What a plunge!’: Fiction as Self-Evasion in Mrs Dalloway.” Modern Language Review 84.1 (Jan. 1989): 18-25. Print.

Hanson, Clare. Virginia Woolf. London: Macmillan, 1994. Print.

Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Wiley, 1996. Print.

249

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print.

Herwitz, Daniel. “The New Spaces of Modernist Painting.” The Cambridge History of Modernism. Ed. Vincent Sherry. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Print.

Hoff, Molly. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: Invisible Presences. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2009. Print.

Jenkins, T. A. Britain: A Short History. Oneworld Publications, 2001. Print.

Johnson, Erica L. “Contours of Travel and Exile in The Voyage Out.” Journal of Narrative Theory 31.1 (2001): 65-86. JSTOR. Web. 10 Apr 2020.

Katz, Tamar. “Woolf’s Urban Rhythms.” A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. by Jessica Berman, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2016. Print.

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Print.

Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth. “Tea, Gender, and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century England.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994): 131-145. Project Muse. Web. 15 June 2019.

Langland, Elizabeth. “Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel.” PMLA 107.2 (1992): 290-304. JSTOR. Web. 9 Sep. 2019.

Larsson, Lisbeth. Walking Virginia Woolf’s London: An Investigation in Literary Geography. Springer, 2017. Print.

Leaska, Mitchell A. The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977. Print.

250

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Random House E-books, 1999.

Lee, Hermione. The Novels of Virginia Woolf. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print.

Lenin, V. I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy. New York, 1927. 176-189. Print.

Light, Alison. Mrs Woolf and the Servants. London: Penguin-Fig Tree, 2007. Print.

Lynch, Eve M. “The Cook, the Nurse, the Maid, and the Mother: Woolf’s Working Women.” Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations. Ed. Vara Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey. New York: Pace UP, 1993. Print.

Mach, Ernst. Space and Geometry in Light of Physiological, Psychological, and Physical Inquiry. Chicago, 1906. 9-94. Print.

Marcus, Jane. “Britannia Rules the Waves.” Decolonising Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons. Ed. Karen R. Lawrence, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Print.

Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.

Marder, Herbert. Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1968. Print.

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Print.

251 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Midgley, Clare. Gender and Imperialism. Manchester, 1998. 14–15. Print.

Miller, Nathaniel. Euclid and His Twentieth Century Rivals: Diagrams in the Logic of Euclidean Geometry. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2007. Print.

Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996.

Montgomery, Nick. “Colonial rhetoric and the maternal voice: Deconstruction and disengagement in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 46 (1), 2000. Print.

Nadeau, Ashley, and Umass Amherst. “Exploring Women: Virginia Woolf’s Imperial Revisions from The Voyage Out to Mrs. Dalloway.” Modern Language Studies, 44.1, 2014. Print.

Nash, Julie. “Preface: Special Issue on Servants and Literature.” Literature Interpretation Theory 16 (2005): 129-34. Print.

Nava, Mica. “Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store.” The Shopping Experience. Ed. Pasi Falk and Colin Campbell. London: Sage, 1997. 56-91.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York, 1967. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 1882; rpt. New York, 1974. Print.

Noxon, Gerald. “Cinema and Cubism (1900-1915).” The Journal of the Society of Cinematologists 2 (1962): 23-33. JSTOR. 15 June 2019.

Ortega, José. Meditations on Quixote. 1914; rpt. New York, 1963. Print.

252

Ortega, José. The Modern Theme. New York, 1961. Print.

Peach, Linden. Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 137-167. Print.

Phillips, Kathy J. Virginia Woolf Against Empire. University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Print.

Poincaré, Henri. Science and Hypothesis. 1901; rpt. New York, 1952. 50-58. Print.

Poole, Rose. Nation and Identity. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Print.

Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. “Women as Subject and Object of the Gaze in Tragedy.” HELIOS 40.1-2 (2013): 195-221. EBSCO. Web. 10 Apr 2020.

Reed, Christopher. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. Print.

Richter, Harvena. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage. Princeton UP, 1970. Print.

Robbins, Bruce. The Servant’s Hand. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Print.

Ronchetti, Ann. The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's Novels. Routledge, 2013. Print.

Rosenfeld, Natania. “Links into Fences: The Subtext of Class Division in Mrs Dalloway.” LIT 9.2 (Oct. 1998): 139-60. Print.

Rosner, Victoria. Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Print.

253 Ruotolo, Lucio P. The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986. Print.

Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1906. Print.

Scruton, Roger. Modern Culture. A&C Black, 2006. Print.

Seshagiri, Urmila. “Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse.” Modern Fiction Studies, 50:1, 2004. 58-84. Print.

Shiach, Morag. “London Rooms.” Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury Vol.1 Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice. Ed. Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 50-63. Print.

Shiach, Morag. “Modernism, the City and the Domestic Interior.” Home Cultures 2.3 (2005): 251-268. Print.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing. London: Virago, 1991. Print.

Silver, Brenda R. “What’s Woolf Got to Do with It? Or, the Perils of Popularity.” Modern Fiction Studies, 38.1, 1992. Print.

Smith, Anthony D. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Print.

Snaith, Anna. Virginia Woolf. Public and Private Negotiations. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print.

Snaith, Anna and Michael Whitworth. “Introduction.” Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place. Ed. Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 1-28. Print.

254 Soja, Edward W. Seeking Spatial Justice. Vol. 16. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print.

Son, Youngjoo. Here and Now the Politics of Social Space in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, 2006. Print.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Oxford University Press, USA, 1991. Print.

Stevanato, Savina. Visuality and Spatiality in Virginia Woolf's Fiction. Peter Lang, 2012. Print.

Stout, Janis P. Through the Window, Out the Door: Women’s Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama P, 1998. Print.

Squier, Susan M. Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina P, 1985. Print.

Thacker, Andrew. Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester University Press, 2003. Print.

Tilley, Christopher. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Oxford and Providence: Berg, 1994. Print.

Tseng, Ching-fang. “The Flaneur, the Flaneuse, and the Hostess: Virginia Woolf’s (Un) Domesticating Flanerie in Mrs. Dalloway.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 32.1 (2006): 219-258. Print.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Print.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine, 1969. Print.

255

Tyler, Christopher W., and Amy Ione. “Concept of space in 20th century art.” Human Vision and Electronic Imaging VI. Vol. 4299. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2001. Web. 20 June 2019.

Van Den Abbeele, Georges. Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1992. Print.

Von Uexküll, Jakob. “A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds.” Semiotica 89.4, 1992. 319-391. Print.

Vorachek, Laura. “‘The Instrument of the Century’: The Piano as an Icon of Female Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century.” George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 38/39 (2000): 26-43. JSTOR. Web. 20 July 2020.

Yılmaz, Victoria Bilge. Carnivalization of Gender Hierarchies and the Body in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction. Diss. Middle East Technical University, 2016.

Wegner, Phillip E. “Spatial Criticism: Critical Geography, Space, Place and Textuality.” Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002. 179-201. Print.

West-Pavlov, R. Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. Print.

Wheare, Jane. “The Voyage Out: Introduction.” Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works. Ed. Julia Briggs. London: Virago, 1994. 1–31. Print.

Whitworth, Michael H., Ed. Modernism. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. Print.

Williams, Raymond. D. H. Lawrence. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Print.

Williams, Wendy. “Poetics of Space.” Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives. Selected papers from the third annual conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed.

256 Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow, 210–215. New York: Pace University Press, 1994. Print.

Wilson, Mary. The Labors of Modernism: Domesticity, Servants and Authorship in Modernist Fiction. Taylor & Francis Group, New York, 2016. Print.

Wollaeger, Mark A. “Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out.” Modernism/Modernity 8.1, 2001, Project Muse. Web. 27 Mar. 2020.

Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room and One’s Own and Three Guineas. Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. A Writer's Diary. Ed. by Leonard Woolf, Harcourt, Inc., 1954. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Oxford World Classics UK, 2010. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. “Literary Geography.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol.1, Ed. Andrew McNeillie, London: Hogarth Press, 1986. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1985. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” The Captain’s Bed and Other Essays (1924), 115-117. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. HarperCollins UK, 2013. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

257

Woolf, Virginia. “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” Collected Essays, Vol. 4, London: Hoagard, 1967. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Vol. 1, 1915- 1919, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Oliver Bell. Vol. 2, 1920– 1924, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, and Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 5. London: The Hogarth Press 84, 1977. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. The Pargiters: The Novel–Essay Portion of The Years. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth Press, 1978. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. HarperCollins UK, 2013. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. The Years. Oxford World Classics UK, 2009. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas (Annotated). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford World Classics UK, 2009. Print.

Wurtz, James F. “‘I Have Had My Vision’: Empire and the Aesthetic in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” Woolf Studies Annual, 16, 2010. Print.

Zimring, Rishona. “Suggestions of Other Worlds: The Art of Sound in The Years.” Woolf Studies Annual 8 (2002): 127-156. Print.

Zink, Suzana. Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. 2018. Print.

258

Zwerdling, Alex. “Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1977): 69-82. JSTOR. Web. 20 Dec. 2019.

Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Print.

259

APPENDICES

A. CURRICULUM VITAE

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Surname, Name: Özkaya, Rana Nationality: Turkish (TC) Date and Place of Birth: 13 May 1989, Konya Marital Status: Married email: [email protected]

EDUCATION

Degree Institution Year of Graduation MS METU English Literature 2014 BA METU English Language Teaching 2011 (Major) METU German Language (Minor) 2011 High Selçuklu Atatürk Anatolian Teacher 2007 School Training High School

260

WORK EXPERIENCE

Year Place Enrollment 2011- TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Instructor Present Department of Foreign Languages

FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Advanced English, Intermediate German

SCHOLARSHIPS

TÜBİTAK- National Scholarship Programme for PhD Students TÜBİTAK- National Scholarship Programme for MSc Students

PUBLICATIONS

1. Kahveci, Rana. “The Issue of Post-colonial Identity in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album.” Hanif Kureishi and His Work: 17th METU British Novelists Conference Proceedings. Ed. Nurten Birlik, Buket Doğan, Seda Coşar Çelik. Ankara, 2010. 178-183. ISBN: 978-605- 125-246-9

261

B. TURKISH SUMMARY / TÜRKÇE ÖZET

Mike Crang ve Nigel Thrift’in, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre ve Michel Foucault gibi çeşitli düşünürlerin mekân çalışmalarını araştıran kitaplarının girişinde söyledikleri gibi, mekân modern düşüncenin her yerindedir (1). Michel Foucault da, Crang ve Thrift’ ten otuz yıl önce, çağının mekânın hükmedeceği bir çağ olabileceğini iddia ederek benzer bir söylemde bulunmuştur (22). Bu bağlamda, Zink’in de belirttiği gibi, Foucault ve Henri Lefebvre gibi diğer birçok yirminci yüzyıl düşünürünün dikkatlerini mekâna çevirmeye motive eden şey, mekânın toplumsal olarak üretilmiş ve sosyal etkileşimlerle yakından bağlantılı olduğuna inanılmaya başlanmasıydı (14). Bu fikirden önce mekân “insan aktiviteleri ile dolu tarafsız bir kap, boş bir tuvalden” ibaret görülüyordu ki böyle bir anlayış onu “insan varlığının dışında düşünülebilecek mutlak ya da deneye dayalı fiziksel bir kavram” olarak görüyordu (14). Bu anlayış özellikle Lefebvre’nin, mekânın sosyal ilişkileri ima ettiği, içerdiği, tasvir ettiği (82- 83), politik ve ideolojik olduğu (31) yönündeki düşünceleri ile büyük bir değişime uğradı. Wegner’in de vurguladığı gibi, mekân anlayışındaki değişim mekânsal eleştirinin disiplinler arası doğasından kaynaklanmaktadır ve sosyal teori, tarih, coğrafya, mimari, antropoloji, felsefe, edebi ve kültürel eleştiri gibi çeşitli alan çalışmalarının sonucu ortaya çıkmıştır (180). Wegner ayrıca mekânsal eleştiriyi edebi eserleri okuma ve anlamamızla bütünleştirmenin önemine de değinmekte ve mekân ve mekânsallık kavramlarına dikkat etmenin sadece edebiyatı nasıl okuduğumuzu değil, aynı zamanda ne okuduğumuzu da değiştirdiğini iddia etmektedir (196). Ona göre, mekânsal eleştiriyi edebi eserlere bakış açımıza dâhil edebilmek, sıra dışı edebi formları ve uygulamaları ortaya çıkarmaya ve edebiyatı zenginleştirmeye yardımcı olur (197). Wegner’in belirttiği gibi, burada önemli olan edebi metinlere yeni okumalar ve bakış açıları getirme fikridir. Bu bağlamda,

262 modernizme ve modernist edebiyatın en iyi temsilcilerinden biri olan Virginia Woolf’a mekânsal eleştiri perspektifinden yaklaşmak, modernizmin ruhunu karakterize eden, eski formların, hiyerarşilerin ve sözde gerçeklerin genel çöküşünü göstermede yararlı olabilir. Bu sebeple, Virginia Woolf’un The Voyage Out (1915), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) ve The Years (1937) romanlarında mekân ve yer temsilleri üzerine çalışan bu tez, bilinç ve iç gerçeklik üzerine yoğunlaşan modernist akımın ilk ve en seçkin temsilcilerinden biri olan Virginia Woolf’un bu eserlerde toplumsal sistem eleştirilerini mekân temsilleri üzerinden yaptığını iddia eder. Woolf, ataerkil, sınıf tabakalı, milliyetçi ve emperyalist sosyal sistemler gibi dominant sosyal sistemlere yönelik eleştirilerini bu romanlarda mekân temsilleriyle aktarmaktadır ve bu romanlardaki mekân ve yer temsilleri özellikle üç önemli kuramcının fikirleriyle yakınlıklar göstermektedir. Bu kuramcılar Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan ve Bachelard’tır. Bu çalışma, Woolf’un romanlarının, toplumun yapısını ve yaşadığı mekânı düzenleyen baskın toplumsal sistemlerin mekânsal uygulamalarını ve mekânlara yükledikleri anlamları ortaya koyduğunu, ideolojisini fiziksel ve zihinsel mekân üzerine geleneksel düşünce kodları ile ortaya koyan ve yeniden üreten baskıcı güç mekanizmalarını eleştirdiğini ve onlara karşı çıktığını savunur. Böyle bir bulgu Henri Lefebvre ve Yi-Fu Tuan gibi mekân teoristlerinin toplumsal mekânın değişken ve değişime açık olduğu fikriyle aynı yöndedir. Henri Lefebvre’nin The Production of Space (1974) kitabında geliştirdiği toplumsal mekân kavramı, Woolf’un kurgusunda incelendiğinde farklı cinsiyetten, sınıftan ve milliyetlerden bireylerde farklılık gösteren heterojen mekânsal deneyimleri ve algıları açığa çıkarır ve bu şekilde sosyal ilişkileri ve beşeri coğrafyayı daha yapıcı bir şekilde kurmanın yolunu hazırlar.

Virginia Woolf 19. yüzyıl edebiyatının geleneksel tekniklerine aykırı eserler üreten İngiliz modernist yazarların en önemlilerinden biridir. Woolf’un eserleri, bilinç akışı tekniği, serbest dolaylı anlatım, psikanaliz, içe dönüş, çoklu anlatı bakış açıları ve karakterlerin yalnızlığı, yabancılaşma ve hayal kırıklığı gibi modernist edebiyatla ilişkilendirilen unsurları içerir. Woolf’un kurgusunda mekân anlayışını ve temsilini

263 analiz etmeden önce modernizme ve modernist mekân anlayışına kısaca değinmek fayda sağlayacaktır.

Dünyayı algılamanın ve dünyayla etkileşime girmenin geleneksel yollarına radikal bir yanıt olan modernizm, 19. yüzyılın sonlarında ortaya çıktı ve 20. yüzyılın ortalarına kadar sürdü. Sanatta modernizm, Birinci Dünya Savaşı’ndan önceki ve sonraki yıllarda, hayatın, zamanın ve mekânın bireysel ve sosyal deneyimlerinde yaşanan hızlı ve muazzam değişimleri ele almanın bir yolu olarak gelişti. Modernizm, kentleşme ve sanayileşmenin yükselişi, bilimsel ve teknolojik gelişmeler, Marksizm ve sosyalizm, teolojik şüphecilik, toplumsal hareketlilik ve psikanaliz ve feminizm konularına artan farkındalık gibi uzun süredir devam eden faktörlerle yakından bağlantılıydı ve Lefebvre’nin de söylediği gibi bütün bunlar geleneksel düşünme biçimlerinin radikal bir şekilde sorgulanmasını sağladı (25). Domancich’e göre, zaman anlayışının fiziksel ve toplumsal zaman olarak ayrı şekillerde algılanması ve uzun süredir var olan mutlak ve sabit toplumsal mekân anlayışının yerini değişken ve göreceli bir toplumsal mekân anlayışına bırakması bu dönemde gerçekleşti (5). Toplumsal mekân, demiryolu ve radyo ile iletişim ağının genişletilmesi, otomobil, bisiklet ve telgraf gibi yeni teknolojik gelişmelerle, parçalanmış, göreceli, dengesiz, dinamik ve değişime açık olarak görülmeye başlandı.

Modernist edebiyat, bireysel deneyimlerin, mekânın ve zamanın bu şekilde algılanmaya başlamasını en çok konu edinen ve inceleyen alanlardan biridir. Modernist İngiliz romancılar, karakteristik iç monologlara (bilinç akışları) sahip çoğul bakış açısı kullanımı gibi teknikler yardımıyla, karakterlerin farklı toplumsal mekân ve zaman algılarını ortaya çıkardılar. Geleneksel zaman ve mekân fikirleri terk edildi ve değiştirildi. Modernist yazarlar, zaman ve mekânı, eş zamanlılık ve deneyimleri karşılaştırma teknikleri kullanarak, bireyler tarafından tecrübe edilen ve algılanan şekilde yaratmaya ve temsil etmeye çalıştılar (Harvey 239). Bu sebeple, modernist roman, okuyucunun, olayları ya da durumları bir süreklilik yerine,

264 parçalardan oluşan, “mekânsal” ve “bir an” içinde kavrayacağı şekilde yazılmıştır (239).

Virginia Woolf’un romanları modernist dönemi karakterize eden hızlı değişim duygusunu ortaya koyar. Kern’in iddia ettiği gibi, geleneksel düşünce biçimlerinin ve uygulamalarının çöküşü, en güzel biçimiyle Woolf tarafından, insan karakterinin yirminci yüzyılın başında radikal bir biçimde değiştiğini söylediğinde ifade edilmiştir (183). Woolf, bu değişimin mutfakta bile görülebilen, ev sahipleri ve hizmetkârlar, eşler, ebeveynler ve çocuklar arasındaki ilişkileri etkileyen dramatik bir değişiklik olduğunu belirtti ve sembolik bir şekilde, çağın öne çıkan sesini “kırılma ve düşme, çarpma ve yıkım sesi” olarak yorumladı (Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” 115-117).

Snaith ve Whitworth’un iddia ettiği gibi, Woolf’un hem kurgusal hem de kurgusal olmayan eserleri, her zaman ulusal alanlar, sivil alanlar, özel alanlar veya yazarın metin alanları gibi mekânlar içerir ve Woolf bu mekânlar üzerinden toplumun baskıcı dominant sistemlerine göndermeler yapar (1). Woolf’un mekân, yer ve bireyler arasındaki ilişkiyi gösterme isteği birçok romanında görülebilir. Buna örnek olarak Clarissa’nın Mrs Dalloway’ de Shaftesbury Bulvarı’na giden bir otobüste kendisini her yerde ve her yerin bir parçası olarak hissetmesi gösterilebilir (129). Clarissa bu yolculuk sırasında insanların, nesnelerin ve yerlerin birbiriyle olan ilişkisi ve karşılıklı bağımlılıkları üzerine düşünür. Kendi kişiliğinin ve hayatının diğer insanlara, nesnelere ve yerlere bağlantılı olarak mümkün olduğunu ve onlardan ayrılmaz olarak düşünülmesi gerektiğinin farkına varır. Bunlara ek olarak, Woolf romanlarında, fiziksel ve zihinsel mekânların, değişmez ve aşılamaz olarak tanımlanan sınırları aracılığıyla, toplumsal otorite aracı olarak nasıl işlev gördüklerini ortaya koyar. Aynı zamanda, farklılıkları ve değişimi teşvik eden bir mekân anlayışının da geliştirilebileceğini ima eder. Snaith ve Whitworth’ün de belirttiği gibi, Woolf’un romanlarının bu yenilikçi mekân anlayışı yeterince incelenmemiştir (2). Bu noktadan yola çıkarak, bu çalışma, Woolf’un romanlarında, modernist metinlerin analizinde iç dünyanın yansıtılmasına geçişle sık sık ihmal

265 edilen, sosyal ve tarihi bağlamlara yapılan göndermelerin yeniden değerlendirilmesine katkıda bulunmayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu bağlamda tezin analiz sonuçlarını ortaya koymadan önce analiz kısmında kullanılan teorilerden kısaca bahsetmek doğru olacaktır.

Analizlerde, mekân üzerindeki fikirlerinden sıklıkla yararlanılan teorisyenlerden biri Henri Lefebvre’dir ve kendisinin The Production of Space (1974) kitabından faydalanılmaktadır. Lefebvre, Foucault’nun, yirminci yüzyılın ikinci yarısında, “mekân çağı” olarak adlandırdığı şeyin başlatılmasında kilit bir figürdü (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 22). Lefebvre, mekânın oluşturulmasında faaliyet gösteren “üretim güçlerini” “doğa, emek, emeğin örgütlenmesi, teknoloji ve bilgi” olarak tanımlar (46). Her mekân sosyal yapıya veya belirli bir kültürel uygulamaya hizmet etmek için inşa edilmiştir. Bu şekilde üretilen mekân, bir üretim ve gücün kontrol aracı olmasının yanı sıra bir düşünce ve eylem aracıdır (26). Ona göre toplumsal mekân, bu dinamik ilişkilerin kapsamlı bir incelemesi yapılmadan tam olarak anlaşılamayacak kadar karmaşıktır. Bu kültürel materyalist mekân anlayışı, mekânı ve yeri kesin ve istikrarlı fiziksel varlıklar olarak gören geleneksel anlayışı reddeder ve sosyal, kültürel ve ekonomik sistemlerle bağlarından dolayı onları değişken olarak kabul eder.

Lefebvre, her söylemin bir mekânda var olduğuna dikkat çeker, çünkü ona göre, her söylem temelde mekân veya belirli yerler hakkında bir şeyler anlatır ve bir mekândan yayılır (141). Bu bağlamda, bilginin de bireylerin taraf tuttuğu ve söylemlerindeki nesneler hakkındaki fikirlerini ifade edebileceği bir mekân olduğu fikrini sık sık vurgular. Ayrıca, egemen iktidar söyleminin bireyleri ve yaşamın her parçasını derinden nasıl etkilediğine ve toplumsal mekânları kurduğuna dikkat çeker. Örneğin, Hristiyanlık ideolojisi kendi devamlılığını kilise, mabet ve sunak gibi çeşitli mekânlar üzerinden sağlamıştır (52). Aynı şekilde, ataerkil toplum düzeni kendi sürekliliğini sağlayabilmek için kadınlara ve erkeklere farklı toplumsal mekânlar vermiştir. Eski Yunan Uygarlığı’nda görüldüğü üzere, kadının yeri eviydi ve ev içindeki bu yer genel olarak ocak etrafına yoğunlaşmıştı (248).

266 Lefebvre, beden ve mekân arasındaki bağlantıya da dikkat çeker. Yaşayan bir bedenin hem kendini hem de o belirli mekânı oluşturduğunu iddia eder. Bu anlayışa göre, enerjisinin emrinde olan beden, hem kendi alanını yaratır hem de o alanın kendine özgü yasalarını ve uygulamalarını belirler (179). Bir çeşit mekân olan canlı beden, sadece kendisini değil, kendi muadilini veya diğerini de oluşturur (193).

Lefebvre’nin mekân anlayışına göre, mekân kültürel, tarihsel ve ideolojik olarak inşa edilmiştir. Toplumsal mekân toplumun ürünüdür ve toplumsal ilişkileri içerir ve ima eder (26). Doğal mekân bile toplumun bir ürünüdür ve içinde yapılması ve yapılmaması gereken bir takım uygulamalar bütününü içerir ki bu bize tekrar mekân ve güç arasındaki yakın ilişkiyi anımsatır (151). Bu bağlamda Lefebvre, toplumsal mekânın, sadece geçmiş eylemlerin değişmez bir sonucu değil, aynı zamanda yeni eylemlerin gerçekleşmesine izin veren bir ürün olduğunu iddia eder (73). Dolayısıyla toplumsal mekân, ölü nesneler tarafından işgal edilen boş ve tarafsız bir ortam değil, çatışmalarla dolu bir kuvvet alanıdır (145). Aynı zamanda hem baskıcı hem de özgürleştirici, yeni kullanımlara ve uygulamalara açık dinamik bir alandır.

Mekân birbiriyle bağlantılı üç mekânsal olgudan oluşur: fiziksel mekân (algılanan mekân ya da mekânsal uygulama), zihinsel mekân (tasarlanan mekân ya da mekânın temsili) ve toplumsal mekân (yaşanan mekân ya da temsili mekân). Mekânın uzun yıllardır süre gelen tanımlarına benzeyen fiziksel mekân anlayışı, duyular yoluyla algılanan fiziksel formu ifade ederken, zihinsel mekân bilim adamları, planlamacılar, sosyal mühendisler ve şehirciler tarafından üretilen kavramsal veya fiziksel olmayan teknik sunumları ifade eder (46). Mekân üretimi bu ikisine dayanır, ancak hayal gücümüzden güçlü bir şekilde etkilenen ve değişime daha açık olan toplumsal mekândan daha fazla etkilenir. Fiziksel ve zihinsel mekân mevcut baskın düzen tarafından şekillenme ve sürdürülme eğilimine sahipken, toplumsal mekân yaşar ve konuşur. Duyusal bir çekirdeği veya merkezi vardır. Ego, yatak, yatak odası, konut, ev, kilise ve mezarlık toplumsal mekâna örnek gösterilebilir. Tutku, eylem ve yaşanmış durumların mevcudiyetini kucaklar ve böylece hemen zamanı ifade eder (42).

267 Lefebvre, bir toplumda bulunan egemen ideolojilerin, bireylerin hareketlerini toplumlarındaki belirli yerlerle sınırlandıran mekân kodlamalarını nasıl ürettiğini inceler. Toplumun bireyleri bu özel mekânsal kodları kabul ederek mekânlarına ve bu mekânların kurallarına uyarak yaşayabilirler (17) ya da daha önce de belirtildiği gibi, toplumsal mekânın değişime açık olma özelliği sayesinde, kendilerine biçilen alanlara meydan okuyan “farklı bir mekân” yaratabilirler (302). Bütün bu mekân çeşitlerine ek olarak, Lefebvre iki farklı mekân türünden daha bahseder: “egemen (baskın)” ve “tahsil edilen” mekân. Egemen mekânı teknoloji ya da yaygın uygulamalar tarafından dönüştürülen bir alan olarak tanımlar. Ona göre egemen olan mekân politik güçle yakından ilişkilidir. Askeri mimari, tahkimatlar ve barajlar egemen mekânın birçok güzel örneğidir (173). Öte yandan, tahsis edilen mekânı, bir grubun ihtiyaçlarını karşılamak için değiştirilen ve o grup tarafından kullanılan bir tür doğal alan olarak tanımlar. Bu iki mekânın hiçbir zaman birbirinden ayrılmadığını, bir toplumdaki tüm mekânların birbirine bağlı olduğunu vurgular.

Lefebvre’nin mekân teorisinden sonra, sosyoloji, coğrafya, feminist coğrafya, kentsel çalışmalar ve kültürel çalışmalar gibi çeşitli disiplinlerde mekânla ilgili araştırmalarda bir artış olmuştur ve bunların hepsi mekân ve egemen güç arasındaki ilişkiye yeni bir ışık tutmuştur. Hepsi, mekânın homojen, nesnel ve boş bir kap olarak algılandığı geleneksel mekân kavramına meydan okuyup, toplumsal mekânın kişiden kişiye cinsiyeti, sınıfı, ırkı ve milliyeti ile bağlantılı olarak değişen, insan hedeflerinin ve uygulamalarının bir ürünü ve üreticisi olduğunu iddia ederler.

Bu çalışmada kullanılan diğer önemli teorisyen, mekân ve yer üzerine, bu kavram ve olguların insanlarla ilişkisini ortaya koymak için çalışan, bir dizi etkili makale ve kitap yayınlayan coğrafyacı Yi-Fu Tuan’dır. İnsan coğrafyasının felsefe, sanat, psikoloji ve din ile birleştirilmesine öncülerden biri olarak kabul edilen Tuan’ın çalışmaları “hümanist coğrafya” olarak bilinen alanın kurulmasına katkı sağladı. Hümanist coğrafya, insanların mekânla, fiziksel ve sosyal ortamlarıyla nasıl etkileşime girdiğini inceleyen bir coğrafya dalıdır. Nüfusun mekânsal ve zamansal dağılımını ve toplumsal sistemleri inceler. Ayrıca insanların algılarının,

268 yaratıcılıklarının ve kişisel inançlarının çevrelerine ve çevrelerindeki farklı alanlara karşı tutum geliştirmedeki rollerine işaret eder. Tuan Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977) adlı eserinde, insanların evlerine, mahallelerine veya kasabalarına, şehirlerine ve ülkelerine nasıl bağlı olduklarını ve mekân ve yer hakkındaki duygularının kültür, toplum ve zamanın algılanma şeklinden nasıl etkilendiğini gösterir.

Tuan, insanların mekânlara anlam yüklemek için motive olduklarına inanır. Bu anlam verme sürecinin, bireylerin kişisel bilincinden, durumundan (dik bir merdiveni çıkmanın bir bebek, genç ve yaşlı bir insan tarafından farklı algılanması örneğinde görülebilir) ve kültürel farklılıkları aşarak ortak bir noktada buluşan kolektif insan bilincinden de (istisnasız tüm kültürlerde gökyüzünün tanrının mekânı olarak görülmesi örneğinde görülebilir) etkilendiğini kabul etse bile, bireylerin ait olduğu toplumdan daha güçlü bir şekilde etkilendiğine inanmaktadır (52). Örneğin, Amerikalılar, Batı’nın açık düzlüklerini özgürlük ve fırsat işareti olarak benimserken, Rus köylüler geniş açık alanları umutsuzluk, engelleme ve doğanın insanın acılarına karşı ilgisizliği ile ilişkilendirdiler (56). Başka bir örnek ise turistlerin Oregon’daki Crater Gölü’nü daha önce bu yerin başka yerlerde gördükleri resimleriyle eşleştirdiğini ve bu yüzden mekânı kişisel olarak deneyimleyip, içselleştiremediklerini gösteriyor.

Tuan, kitabının ilerleyen bölümlerde, zaman ve mekân arasındaki ilişkiyi de inceliyor. Nesneleri yorumlama ve deneyimleme sürecinde zaman ve mekânın önemine değiniyor. İddia ettiği gibi, dil, insanlar, mekân ve zaman arasında samimi bir bağlantı vardır: Bu bağlamda, zaman, mekân ve yer arasındaki ilişki, mekânın duraklama olarak düşünülürken zamanın akış olarak algılanması olarak özetlenebilir. Örneğin, birçok efsane “uzun zaman önce, uzak bir yerde” diye başlamaktadır ya da tatilciler, genellikle uzak yerleri zamansızlık kavramıyla bağlantılı olarak algılayıp, oralara kaçıp gitmek istediklerini söylerler (122). Bu bağlamda, Tuan zamanın sınırlarından kurtulma hissinin, bir kişi dans ettiğinde ya da müzikle uğraştığında da ortaya çıktığını iddia eder. Kişi normalde sadece ileri doğru adım attığında kendini

269 rahat hisseder. Geriye doğru adım atmak rahatsızlık verir. Tuan’a göre, müzik eşliğinde dans etmek “tarihi zaman ve yönelimli mekân” dan kaçmayı sağlar. İnsanlar dans ettiklerinde ileriye, yana ve hatta geriye doğru kolaylıkla hareket edebilirler. Müzik ve dans insanları, amaca yönelik yaşamın taleplerinden kurtarır ve Erwin Straus’un “mevcut yönlendirilmemiş mekân” dediği yerde kısa sürede olsa rahatlamalarını sağlar (129).

Tuan, “dünyanın temel bileşenleri” (3) olarak tanımladığı mekân ve yerin deneyimlenmesindeki ve algılanmasındaki farklılıkları araştırmaktadır. Tuan’a göre mekân soyut bir düşüncedir ve bir yeri “bildiğimizde” ona bir değer ve anlam yüklemiş oluruz (6). Bilinmeyen bir mekân deneyimlerimizle birlikte bilindik bir yere dönüşür. Mekân ve yer birbirlerine çok yakın iki kavramdır ve birbirlerine bağlıdırlar. Mekânı tanımlamak için bir yerden bir yere hareket edebilmek gerekir; ancak bir yerin var olması için, bu yerin oluşacağı bir mekâna ihtiyacı vardır. Tuan’ın mekân ve yer arasında bulduğu bir diğer önemli ayrım, mekân ve yer ile ilişkili güvenlik ve özgürlük duygularıyla ilgilidir: mekân açık, sınırsız, özgürlükler ve olasılıklar sağlarken, yer kapalı, sınırlı, kısıtlı ve güvenlidir. Özgürlük insanın doğuştan gelen en baskın arzularından biridir ama özellikle batıda tehdidi de çağrıştırmaktadır. Bu açık alanın anlamlar yüklenmiş olmamasından ve tamamen bilinmemesinden kaynaklanıyor olabilir. Bu bilinmeyen mekân, yerleşik insani anlam kalıplarını barındırmaz ve onların kendine yüklenmesini bekler.

Tuan’a göre, evde deneyimlerimiz samimi, kişisel ve özeldir ve eve ve vatana olan bağlılığımız arasında bir ilişki vardır. Vatanımıza olan bağımız yoğundur ve bu semboller üreten insanoğlunun en belirgin özelliklerinden biridir (18). İnsanlar anavatanlarını dünyanın merkezi olarak görmeye eğilimlidir. Bazı insanlar arasında coğrafya tarafından desteklenmese de, dünyanın tepesinde yaşadıkları ya da yaşadıkları yerin kutsal ve dünyanın zirvesinde olduğu inancı var (38-39). Bu, ortak, insani ve duygusal bir davranıştır ve kendimizi ifade edebilmemizin bir çeşididir. Şehrimiz ya da vatanımız beslenme kaynağımızdır; kadınsıdır ve anavatan olarak adlandırılır. Anılarımızın ve muhteşem başarılarımızın bir arşivi olarak görülür,

270 kalıcıdır ve bu nedenle her yerde yıkıcı bir değişim gören insana güven verir (154). Bu yüzden insanlar genelde başka uluslardan ya da yerlerden olan insanları başkalaştırırlar. Bütün bunlara ek olarak, Tuan mimarinin de insan hayatındaki rolüne dikkat çekiyor. Anıtlar, mezarlıklar, türbeler, kamusal öneme sahip binalar ve yapılar, bireylerin kimlik duygusunu ve aidiyet ve sadakat duygularını güçlendirmeye hizmet eder. Bu bağlamda, Tuan’ın tasarlanan çevre ve mimariye ilişkin fikirleri, Lefebvre’nin zihinsel mekânla ilgili fikirlerini, özellikle de bu mekânların dominant ideolojilere nasıl hizmet ettiği fikrini çağrıştırmaktadır.

Bu tezde yapılan analizlerde fikirlerinden yararlanılan bir diğer teorisyen mekâna fenomonolojik bir anlayışıyla yaklaşan Gaston Bachelard’dır. Bachelard, kariyeri boyunca, geleneksel akıl yürütme yöntemlerine tabi olmayan bir gerçekliği keşfetmek için, kendisinin ve diğer şair ve yazarların hayal gücünde ve şiirsel imgelerinde ifade edilen “bireysel bilincin” (Giriş xix) öznelliğini inceleyerek, gerçekliğe yeni bir yaklaşım benimsemeye karar verdi. Bu çalışmalar sonunda, hayal gücünün insan doğasının belirleyici bir niteliği olduğuna ve şiirsel imgelerin mantık kurallarına bağlı olmadığı sonucuna ulaştı. Hayal gücünün mekân, zaman ve güç unsurları üzerinde ne kadar özgürce hareket ettiğini ısrarla vurguladı (112). Bu bağlamda, içinde yaşanmış bir ev de sadece geometrik veya fiziksel bir alan olmaktan çıkıyordu ve içinde yaşayan insanların onu algıladığı şekille değişik alanlara dönüşebiliyordu. Bachelard’ın The Poetics of Space eseri, ev gibi, şiire egemen olan yaşam alanlarının anlamlarının fenomonolojik bir sorgusudur: bir ev içindeki odalar, çekmeceler, şifonyerler ve orman veya büyük bir manzaraya sahip alanlar, Bachelard’ın incelediği, samimi ve mahrem olarak adlandırdığı mekânlardır. Bu kitapta, “topolojik analiz” olarak adlandırdığı metotla mahrem yaşam alanlarımızın sistematik psikolojik çalışmasını yapmaktadır.

Bachelard evin, hayalperestliği sağladığını öne sürerek, evi tüm mekânların en samimisi ve mahremi olarak görüyor; evi anlamanın insan ruhunu anlamanın bir yolu olduğunu iddia ediyor (42). Ona göre, insan ruhu şiirlerde evlerin içinde bulunan imgeler aracılığıyla anlaşılabilir. Ev hem birlik hem de karmaşıklığa sahiptir, anılar

271 ve deneyimlerden oluşur, farklı bölümleri farklı duyumlar üretir; ancak değişmeyen ve samimi bir yaşam deneyimi sağlar.

Bachelard, özellikle de çocukluğa göre düşünüldüğünde, evin psişik bir durumun göstergesi olarak işlev görebildiğini ileri sürüyor çünkü ona göre hepimiz belirli bir evde yaşamanın fonksiyonlarının diyagramıyız ve yaşadığımız diğer tüm evler bu temel ev üstüne inşa ediliyor (15). Doğduğumuz ev fiziksel olarak bile içimize işlemiştir. Çok uzun bir süre sonra bile yüksek adımlı merdiveninin üzerinde ayağımız takılmadan ilerleriz ya da o farklı tavan arasında yolumuzu buluruz. Bunlara ek olarak, Bachelard evin psişik durumumuzu nasıl ortaya çıkardığını göstermek için, farklı ülkelerden çocuklar tarafından çizilmiş evlerin resimlerini inceleyen bir çalışmadan yararlanmaktadır. Çalışmanın sonucu Bachelard’ı destekler niteliktedir. Çocuk mutlu bir evde yetişmişse köklü temeller üzerine inşa edilmiş sağlam, korunaklı ve doğru bir şekle sahip bir ev çizmeyi başarmıştır. Böyle çocukların çizdiği ev resimleri evin huzuru hakkında da çatıdan gelen yumuşak bir duman, sıcak ve içeride yanan büyük bir ateş gibi bir ipucu içermektedir (72). Alman işgalinin zulmüne maruz kalan Polonyalı ve Yahudi çocuklar ise sıkıntı ve sefaleti ima eden bir ev çizmişlerdir. Dışarıdaki savaştan korkup dolaba gizlenmiş bir çocuk, bu kötü zamanlar bittikten çok sonra bile, dar, soğuk, kapalı evler çizmeye devam etmiştir (72).

Bachelard, evin sadece çocukluk anısı ile değil, bir barınak ve sığınak özelliğine dayanılarak, huzur veren anne vücudu ile sık sık ilişkilendirildiğini ileri sürüyor. Doğduğumuz evi düşündüğümüzde, bu keyifli sıcaklığı ve konfor, samimiyet, uyum, birlik ve koruma duygularını tekrar deneyimliyoruz. Bachelard’a göre, bu rahatlatıcı, güvenli ve uyumlu ev, sürekli onu temizleyen ve düzenleyen anne tarafından içerden inşa edilir. Evin babası ise bu “balmumu uygarlığını” bilmeden dışarıdan inşa eder (68). Bachelard, kadın/iç mekân ve erkek/dış mekân arasındaki bölünmeyi doğallaştıran böylesine özcü ve indirgemeci fikri benimsemenin yanı sıra, ev hanımlığının kadınlar için yararlı olduğunu iddia ederek, kadınların evde sarf ettiği emeğini de görünmez kılmaktadır çünkü ona göre ev işleri kadınların zihinlerini ve

272 bedenlerini eğlendirmektedir (81). Bu bağlamda, Henri Lefebvre gibi çeşitli eleştirmenler tarafından iddia edildiği gibi, Bachelard’ın zamansızlık, durağanlık, düzen ve analık ile bağdaştırdığı ev; değişken, sosyal, tarihi ve kamusal olarak kurduğu dış mekân kavramıyla tamamen zıt düşmektedir. Bu zıtlık, iç ve dış mekânda var olan sosyal ilişkileri, çatışmaları ve gerilimleri doğallaştırarak sadece farklı cinsiyetler arasında değil, aynı zamanda farklı sınıflar ve milliyetler arasında eşit olmayan güç ilişkilerini koruyan bir mekân anlayışı oluşturmaktadır.

Bu tezin analiz kısımlarında varılan sonuçlara kısa bir göz atmak istenirse, şu gibi önemli bulgulardan bahsedilebilir. İncelenen bu dört roman, eleştirileri odaklarında, yoğunluklarında ve vurguladıkları noktalarda farklılık gösterseler de, toplumlarının ve zamanlarının güçlü ideolojilerine hizmet eden, belirli mekânsal kodlarla atfedilen fiziksel ve zihinsel mekânlara dikkat çeken bir ilgi göstermektedirler. İlk analitik bölüm, The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse ve The Years isimli romanların, toplumlarının ataerkil, sınıf tabakalı ve emperyalist sosyal sistemi sürdürmeyi amaçlayan iç mekân ideolojisini (çatışmaların ve direnişin olmadığı, tek tip bir imajı teşvik eden iç mekân anlayışı) ortaya çıkarmak ve zayıflatmak için iç mekânı nasıl temsil ettiklerini araştırmaktadır. İkinci analitik bölüm ise, The Voyage Out’un ve Mrs Dalloway’in toplumlarının ataerkil, sınıf tabakalı ve emperyalist sosyal ideallerini koruyan dış mekân kavramını ortaya çıkarmak ve yıkmak için nasıl bir yöntem izlediğini inceler. Bu iki bölümün her bir alt bölümü, mekânların farklı baskın sosyal sistemler tarafından inşa edilmesine odaklanarak söz konusu ev veya dış mekân temsillerini inceler ve farklı sonuçlara ulaşır.

İlk analitik bölümün ilk kısmında, The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse ve The Years isimli romanlarda iç mekânın farklı cinsiyetler açısından nasıl temsil edildiğine odaklanılıyor. Ortaya çıkan sonuç, bu romanların farklı cinsiyetlerin karakterleri arasında, domestik mekânların kullanımı ve algısı ile ilgili olarak çizilen farklılıklara ısrarla başvurarak, domestik mekân ve dış (kamusal) mekân arasında yapılan fiziksel ve zihinsel ayrımın, İngiliz toplumunun baskın ataerkil düzenini sürdürmesinin temelini oluşturduğunu vurgulamalarıdır. Diğer

273 önemli sonuç ise, bu romanlar ev kavramını, kadınlık, rahatlık, düzen, istikrar ve sabitlik gibi ataerkil olarak teşvik edilen ideolojik özellikleriyle yansıtmaktadır. Böyle bir temsil, evin çocukluğun hatırasını oluşturduğunu iddia eden ve evi barınak ve sığınak özelliği dolayısıyla huzur veren anne vücuduyla ilişkilendiren Bachelard’ın fikirleriyle doğru orantılı düşünülebilir. Bu romanlar, ev kavramının bu tür ataerkillik idealleri tarafından nasıl inşa edildiğini ve sürdürüldüğünü yansıtmak için, karakterlerin ataerkil fikirlerini, davranışlarını ve tutumlarını (mekâna odaklanarak), erkek ve kadın karakterlerin aynı yerde bile (evde) farklı mekânları işgal ettiğini ve bu mekânlarda kendilerine uygun görülen farklı aktiviteleri yaptıklarını göstermektedirler. Bu tür temsillerde, bu romanların, Lefebvre’nin mekânın sosyal ve ideolojik olarak inşa edildiği ve dilin yanı sıra bilginin, bir kişinin bir bakış açısını benimseyebileceği ve nesneleri kendi bakış açısıyla ele alabileceği bir alan olarak hizmet ettiği iki önemli fikrini (19) yansıttığı söylenebilir. Bu romanlarda birçok sahnede ataerkilliğin ev içi mekânlarda bile kadınlara ve erkeklere farklı alanlar tahsis ettiği gözlenir: erkekler, sık sık, mahremiyetten zevk alabilecekleri ve meslekleriyle uğraşabilecekleri bir çalışma odasına sahip olarak tasvir edilirken, kadınlar daha kamusal olan, onlara kendi ilgi alanlarına hatta kendilerine yüklenmiş ev işlerine bile odaklanmalarına izin verecek kadar gizlilik garantisi vermeyen yemek odasını işgal ederler. Tezin bu bölümünün bir başka önemli bulgusu, bu romanların Tuan’ın, “ayırt edilmemiş” olarak adlandırdığı, insanoğlunun henüz bir anlam yüklemediği mekânların, bireysel bilinç, ya da paylaşılan, genel insan özelliklerinden daha çok, bir toplumun baskın ideolojisi tarafından anlam yüklendiği fikrini yansıtmasıdır. Örneğin, The Voyage Out’da karakterler belirli bir ülkede olmasalar bile, bulundukları geminin mekânlarını toplumlarının ataerkil ve sınıf temelli sistemleri doğrultusunda inşa ederler. Domestik mekânın ataerkillik tarafından inşa edilen tüm bu temsillerine rağmen, bu romanlar domestik mekâna atfedilen tüm bu çağrışım ve anlamlara meydan da okurlar. Bu şekilde domestik mekânı sadece fiziksel ve zihinsel mekândan değil, aynı zamanda toplumsal mekândan oluşan bir şekilde kurup, ataerkil yapısını yıkıyor ve heterojen, dinamik ve değişime açık hale getiriyorlar.

274 Bu bağlamda, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse ve The Years, domestik mekânın kadına uygun mekân olarak görülüp, bu mekâna atfedilen rahatlık ve huzur çağrışımlarının kadın tarafından sağlanması gerektiği fikrine, kadın karakterlerin evde hapsedilme ve rahatsızlık duygularını ileterek, domestik mekânın kamusal mekânın sosyal ve ekonomik kaygılarından ayrılmaz olduğunu göstererek (Lefebvre’nin mekânların birbirine bağlılığı hakkındaki fikirlerini yansıtan ve domestik mekânla kamusal mekân arasındaki keskin ayrımları ortadan kaldıran fikri) ve erkek karakterlerin (yalnızca birkaç erkek karakter olsa bile) evde rahatsızlık hissini ortaya çıkararak karşı çıkarlar. Bunlara ek olarak, iki geleneksel kadın karakter olan Mrs Dalloway’i ve Mrs Ramsay’ı evde tatmin edici olmayan yaşamlarının üstesinden gelmek için evde işgal ettikleri alan üzerinde değişiklikler yaptıklarını göstererek ve kadınların bu çabasını erkeklerin onaylamamasını yansıtarak da meydan okurlar.

The Years ve özellikle de To the Lighthouse domestik mekâna atfedilen, istikrarlı, düzenli ve homojen gibi diğer ataerkil yapıları ve nitelikleri de zayıflatmaktadır. Bu iki roman, domestik mekânı zamanın akışından ve akışkanlığından kaçamayan bir şekilde, sosyal ve kültürel değişime maruz kaldığını göstererek, heterojen, dinamik ve değişime açık olarak kurmaktadır. Domestik mekânın anlamları, bireylerin bakış açıları, zaman ve mesafe gibi bir dizi faktöre göre değişebildiği için, çoğuldur. Ayrıca, To the Lighthouse’un “Time Passes” bölümünde, zaman ve mekân arasında bir ilişkinin kurulduğu belirlenmiştir. Bu bölümde genellikle zamanla ilişkilendirilen akış, akışkanlık ve değişim kavramları mekâna da atfedilmiştir ki bu da Tuan’ın zaman ve mekân arasında samimi bir bağlantı olduğunu söyleyen, her iki kavramın da sosyal yapılar olduğunu vurgulayan fikirlerini yansıtmaktadır. Bu bölümün bir başka önemli sonucu, Woolf’un mekân anlayışında reddettiği sabitlik fikrini bireylere uygulamakta da reddettiğidir. Bu bağlamda, The Years isimli romanda bazı karakterler çocukluklarında yaşama biçimlerinden oldukça farklı bir şekilde yaşarlar, bu da Bachelard’ın (15) çocukluk evini içimizde değişmeyen bir hiyerarşi ve yaşama biçimi olarak kurduğu anlayışa çok zıt bir anlayıştır.

275 İlk analitik bölümün ikinci kısmında, Woolf’un romanlarının domestik mekân temsilleri toplumsal sınıf sistemi ve sorunları açısından incelendi. Bu bağlamda, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse ve The Years romanlarında yapılan analizler bu romanların domestik mekânı sadece cinsiyet odaklı bir açıdan değil toplumsal sınıf sistemi açısından yansıttığı ve temsil ettiğini ortaya çıkardı. Bu romanlar, toplumda bulunan sınıf sisteminin yarattığı mekânsal eşitsizliklere, cinsiyetçi toplum sisteminin sebep olduğu ayrımcılıklara olduğu kadar değinmeseler de, domestik mekândaki farklı sınıflar arasındaki eşit olmayan güç ilişkilerini özellikle iki farklı yolla eleştirel olarak aktarırlar. Bunun ilk yolu, toplumun katı sınıf ayrımlarından kaynaklanan sorunlarla ilgili kaygılarını, hane halkı işçi sınıfı üyelerine verilen odaların betimlemeleriyle ifade etmektir ki bu da üst sınıf karakterlerin işçi sınıfı karakterlerine, evde yaşam ve çalışma koşullarına karşı kayıtsız tutumunu ortaya koymaktadır. Buna ek olarak, bu romanlar evdeki sınıf ilişkilerini, çalışanlar ve ev sahipleri arasındaki ilişkiyi yansıtarak da gösterir, bu da bizi yine Lefebvre’nin dil ve bilginin ideolojinin bir mekânı olarak hizmet verdiği fikrine götürür. Hizmetliler ve ev sahipleri arasındaki etkileşimler üzerine yapılan araştırmalar, ev sahiplerinin hizmetkârları birey olma özelliğine sahip olmayan, aşağı konumda varlıklar olarak algıladıklarını ve onları evde yaptıkları işlerden ötürü takdir etmediklerini gösterir. Bu Lefebvre’nin “mekânın fetişleştirilmesi” olarak adlandırdığı, orta veya üst sınıfın işçi sınıfının varlığını ve emeklerini göz ardı ettiği, işçi sınıfının domestik mekânı üretmede önemli rolünü görmezden geldiği davranış biçimini yansıtır. Orta ve üst sınıf bunu, mekânı kuran üretken emek ve sosyal ilişkileri gizleyerek mevcut sosyal düzeni sürdürmek, böylece vatandaşların mekânı tarafsız bir arka plan olarak görmeleri ve baskın sosyal düzeni kabul etmeleri için yapmaktadır. Mrs Dalloway’teki iki parti sahnesi, To the Lighthouse’taki yemek sahnesi ve The Years’ta çalışan hizmetçilerin vücutlarını bir ele indirgeyen sahne buna birer örnektir.

Fakat bu bölümün ilk kısmında yapılan incelemelerde görüldüğü gibi, Mrs Dalloway ve To the Lighthouse bu temsil biçimini ve bu tarz ilişkileri değişmez bir şekilde yansıtmaz. Domestik mekânda alt sınıf üyelerinin gizlenmiş emeklerini ortaya

276 çıkararak, takdir ederek ve kutlayarak (metnin ya da bazı karakterlerin fikirlerini yansıtarak), bu ayrılıkların sınıflar arasında yarattığı gerilimleri ve çatışmaları eleştirel olarak işaret ederek ve alt sınıfa söz hakkı vererek (ki bazı sahnelerde bu söz hakkını kullanan karakterler bilinçli olmasalar bile üst sınıfların varlığını küçümserler) evde sınıf ilişkilerinin görünüşte katı, değişmez ve homojen yapısını bir dereceye kadar istikrarsızlaştırır.

Mrs Dalloway’den ve To the Lighthouse’tan farklı olarak, The Years, farklı koşullardaki çeşitli sınıflardan insanları barındıran, sabitlik, homojenlik ve düzen yeri olarak algılanan domestik mekân kavramına, İngiliz toplumunun domestik yaşam alanlarında meydana gelen değişiklikleri göstererek meydan okur. Böyle bir temsil toplumsal mekânı dinamik kılar. Viktorya dönemi orta sınıf evi ve onun ulus kavramıyla bağdaştırılmasını ve bunun nasıl alt sınıftan, diğer ulustan insanlardan ve sömürülen diğerlerinden uzak durma arzusundan kaynaklandığını eleştirel bir şekilde ortaya koyan The Years, Viktorya döneminin son zamanlarında meydana gelen mekânsal değişiklikleri (saygın yaşam alanlarında tek bir aile evinde yaşama biçiminin bırakılıp saygın görülmeyen çevrelerde apartman dairelerinde yaşamaya başlanması) göstererek mekân anlayışına dinamik ve değişime açık özelliğini katmıştır. Delia tarafından romanın sonuna doğru düzenlenen partideki konuklar da dâhil olmak üzere, romandaki karakterlerin çoğunun tasvirlerinde görüldüğü gibi, The Years’ta Woolf, zamanının İngiltere’sini, yaşam alanlarında olan bu değişikliğe karşı tamamen memnun ve uyum sağlamış bir biçimde göstermemiştir. Sara, Maggie, Delia ve Eleanor tarafından gösterilen bazı takdir durumları dışında, karakterler alt sınıflara yakın dairelerde veya kiralık odalarda yeni yaşam tarzlarına tamamen pozitif yaklaşamıyor ve uyum sağlayamıyorlar. Özellikle bu dairelerde ya da kiralık odalarda yaşayan ailelerin kadın üyelerinin ekonomik koşulları nedeniyle yoksul kentsel bölgelerde yaşamak zorunda kaldıkları söylenebilir, ancak sınıf ayrımcılığından kaynaklanan sorunlara toplumsal cinsiyet ayrımcılığından kaynaklanan sorunlara yaptıkları gibi çok fazla önem vermedikleri görülmektedir. Bu, toplumsal cinsiyet ayrımcılığının kurbanı olurken, sınıf ayrımcılığının kurbanı olmayıp, aslında bu ayrımcılıktan yararlandıklarından kaynaklanıyor olabilir.

277 Toplumdaki domestik mekân anlayışında meydana gelen tüm bu değişiklikler, bu karakterlerin çoğu tarafından memnuniyetle tasvir edilmemesine rağmen, bu değişimi kucaklayan bazı karakterlerin olması, romana gelecek yıllarda daha kapsayıcı bir toplum için umut dolu bir son veriyor.

İlk analiz bölümünün son kısmında yapılan incelemelerden ortaya çıkan sonuç The Voyage Out’un ve The Years’ın domestik mekânı milliyetçilik anlayışına bağlı bir şekilde sunup, eleştirilerini bu yönde yapmasıdır. Her ikisi de İngilizler arasında yaygın olan ev ve ulus arasında güvenlik, ahlak ve üstünlük açısından yapılan bir analojiye ve bu tür analoji ve bağdaştırmaların içeri ve dışarı ve içerden ve dışarıdan olanlar arasında nasıl büyük ve geçilmez sınırlara yol açtığını ima ediyor. Bu romanlar karakterler arasındaki farklı ulustan olan kişileri dışlama, onları aşağı görme ve kendi ulusunu ve insanlarını üstün görme tutumlarını sıklıkla yansıtıyorlar. Bütün bu tutumlar, önceden de belirtildiği gibi, Tuan’ın insanların uluslarına aşırı bağlılıklarına değindiği fikirleriyle açıklanabilmektedir. Fakat bu romanlar böyle tutumların ve üstün ulus fikrinin yanlışlığını da farklı yollarla (yine mekân temsilleri üzerinden) göstermektedir. Bunun yolu mekânın kurgusallığına bu yüzden de öznel, çoğul, değişken ve değişebilir olduğuna dikkat çekmekten geçer. Bu bağlamda, bu romanlar, yabancı karakterlerin ve çeşitli İngiliz karakterlerin İngiltere ye karşı hissettiği farklı duygu ve fikirlerini ortaya çıkarıp, bu karakterlerin yurtdışında karşılaştıkları yeni ortamı nasıl kendi uluslarının mekân uygulamaları ve prensipleri ile anlamlandırmaya çalıştıklarını gösterir. The Voyage Out’taki Rachel, Helen ve Hewet, ve The Years’taki Eleanor ve North gibi bir çok İngiliz karakter kendi ulusları içindeki şiddet, cinsiyet ayrımcılığı, sınıf çatışması, şehirleşme ve yabancılaşma gibi problemleri vatanları dışındaki pozitif yaşam deneyimleriyle etkili bir şekilde karşılaştırmışlardır (bu olumlu deneyimlerin sayısı sınırlı olsa bile ve çok radikal ve alternatif temsiller üretmeseler bile). Bu gibi problemler içinde Rachel’ın piyano çalarak, hayatın birçok alanından kendini yasaklanmış hissiyatını yenmeye çalışması, dikkate değerdir çünkü bu Tuan’ın piyano, müzik ve dansa yönelik, onların insanları nasıl amaca yönelik mekân ve yaşam hissinden kurtardığı fikirleriyle açıklanabilir. Bu bölümdeki en önemli diğer bir bulgu, bu romanlar

278 içinde, İngiltere’yi eleştirme hakkı verilen ve İngiltere’yi kendi ulusu ile karşılaştırıp, kendi ulusunu yücelten tek kişinin Mrs Dalloway’deki Lucrezia olmasıdır. Lucrezia’nın üstün ulus fikri de Tuan’ın fikirlerinin önemli bir örneğidir. Bu romanlar mekânın üretilen ve kurgulanmış doğasının altını karakterlerin yurtdışında karşılaştıkları yeni ortamı nasıl kendi uluslarının mekân uygulamalarından ve prensiplerinden anlamlandırmaya çalıştıklarını göstererek de çizerler. Bunun örnekleri sadece, İngiltere dışında geçen hikâyesiyle, İngiliz karakterlerinin yeni yaşam alanlarını çoğu zaman Londra’daki yaşamlarıyla kıyaslayarak anlamaya çalıştıkları The Voyage Out’da bulunabilir. Karakterler bu örneklerin çoğunda Londra’yı Santa Marina’dan daha üstün kılmaktadırlar. Son olarak, bu romanlar, mekânın üretilen ve kurgulanmış doğasının altını ve bu yüzden üstün ulus fikrinin yanlışlığını, mekânların birbirine bağlılığı ve bağımlılığı (Lefebvre’nin en önemli fikirlerinden biri) fikrini vurgulayarak da gösterirler. Bu romanların her ikisi de (özellikle The Years), İrlanda’daki çağdaş siyasi duruma ve Hindistan, Mısır veya Afrika’ya sık sık göndermeler yaparlar ve İngiltere’de günlük yaşamın bu uluslara göre şekillendiğini birçok örneklerle gösterirler.

Bu tezin ikinci analiz bölümünde öne çıkan en önemli bulgu, The Voyage Out ve Mrs Dalloway romanlarının, kamusal mekânı temsil biçimi ve anlayışlarının, domestik mekânı temsil biçimlerinden farklı olmadığıdır. Bu iki roman Lefebvre’nin mekân anlayışını Londra’nın kamusal mekân temsillerinde de yansıtırlar. Böyle bir bulgu Lefebvre’nin mekânların birbirine bağlılığı fikrini doğrular. Bu romanlarda Londra, Tuan’ın mekân, yer ve birey arasındaki ilişkiyi titizlikle incelediği yaklaşımını anımsatan şekilde, zamana, mesafeye, cinsiyete, sınıfa ve milliyete bağlı olarak değişen farklı karakter algıları üzerinden de okuyucuya aktarılır. Bu romanlar aynı zamanda bu sınırların bir dereceye kadar aşıldığı ve mekân kavramının çoğul, heterojen, dinamik ve esnek kılındığı bazı anları ve olayları da içerir.

The Voyage Out kadınların kısıtlı yaşam alanları ve koşullarına ve ayrımcı sınıf ve ulus bilincine yönelik eleştirisini İngiliz toplumunun mekân uygulamarına odaklanarak gösterir. Aslında Londra, romanın ilk sayfalarında, Helen ve Ridley

279 Ambrose’un içinde bulundukları zengin Westminster’dan Embankment’a yaptıkları, toplumlarının cinsiyet, sınıf ve emperyalist sorunlarına işaret eden gezi dışında, romanın birincil fiziksel mekânı olarak hizmet etmez. Hikâyenin çoğu Güney Amerika’da geçmesine rağmen roman büyük ölçüde bir Londra hikâyesidir; Londra’nın kadınlarını, erkeklerini, fakirlerini, zenginlerini, geleneklerini ve toplumsal yaşam şekillerini anlatır. Londra ve oradaki yaşam gelenekleri, yeni yaşam alanlarında uzun bir zaman geçtikten sonra bile karakterlerin tutum ve davranışlarını etkilemeye devam eder. Bu Lefebvre’nin zihinsel mekân kavramına etkili bir örnektir. Anlatı aynı zamanda Santa Marina’nın sakinlerinin yaşam alanlarını nasıl kurduğunu ve düzenlediğini Londra ile tezat oluşturarak anlatır. Örneğin, Santa Marina’da evlerin içi genellikle perde çekilmediği için dışarıdan net bir şekilde görülebilir. Böyle bir uygulama, Bakhtin’in karnaval kavramını anımsatır; iç ve dış mekânı birleştirerek, İngiltere’deki domestik ve kamusal mekân arasında keskin bir şekilde çizilen ayrıma büyük bir meydan okur. Romanın bu iki toplumun mekân pratiklerini ve uygulamalarını farklı olarak yansıtması, mekânı sosyal, kültürel ve ideolojik olarak kuran (Lefebvre) ve her toplumun kendine ait bir mekân anlayışı olduğunu benimseyen (Tuan) mekân anlayışlarıyla örtüşmektedir. Ayrıca, Tuan’ın bisiklet ve araba gibi modern araçların insanların mekânı algılama biçimini geliştirdiği fikri de (53), karakterlerinin bir gemi yardımıyla Londra’dan alınıp farklı bir ülkede farklı yaşam biçimlerine ve mekân uygulamalarına maruz bırakılarak, İngiltere’deki yaşam biçimlerine ve mekânsal uygulamalara eleştirel olarak yaklaştıkları bu romanda açıkca görülebilir.

Romanın karakterlerin Santa Marina’ya yolculuk ettiği gemiyi temsil şekli incelendiğinde, geminin bir tür heterotopya olabileceği ortaya sürülmüştür. Gemi kendi gücüyle ilerleyip, karakterlerin (özellikle yolculuğun başında) dünya ve onun egemen sosyal sistemleri ve düzenlemelerinden uzak hissettiği bir yer olarak aktarılmıştır. Böylelikle gemi, karakterlerin özgürlük duygusundan zevk aldıkları ve kısa bir süre için bile olsa istediklerini yaptıkları, dönüştürücü, uyumsuz ve çelişkilerle dolu kültürel bir alan haline gelir. Gemi, yine de, karakterlerin kısa bir süre sonra sosyal alanlarını ve ilişkilerini Londra’daki sosyal sisteme uygun olarak

280 kurmaları açısından tam ve kalıcı bir heterotopya olarak düşünülemez. Romanda gemi gibi iki orman sahnesi de oldukça kısa ömürlü başka birer heterotopya olarak tasvir ediliyor. Bu sahnelerde karakterler, toplumları tarafından uygunsuz görülen şekillerde (Susan ve Arthur’un öpüşmesi veya Rachel ve Hewet arasında geçen benzer samimiyetteki sahne) davranırlar. Bu heterotopyalar Londra’nın ve oradaki yaşam ve mekân uygulamalarının aşılabileceğini öne sürerek, mekânsal kodların ve uygulamaların değişebileceğini ima eder. Ancak, anlatının bu sahneleri kısa tuttuğu ve geleneksel Londra hiyerarşilerini ve uygulamalarını yeniden kurduğu gözlemlenmiştir. Bu sebeple, Londra ile onun baskıcı gelenekleri ve karşıt özgürlük anları ve hareketleri arasında gidip gelen romanın, hiçbir durumu istikrarlı ve sabit olarak tasvir etmediği ve bu istikrarsız, dinamik, çoğulcu ve değişken tutumu nesnelere, insanlara, mekâna ve hayata karşı da sürdürdüğü iddia edilebilir.

Romanın sonlarına doğru ölen Rachel, Londra’daki yaşam alanını (ne domestik ne de kamusal mekânı) farkına yeni vardığı arzuları doğrultusunda yeniden inşa edemez. Ayrıca ne Londra ne de Santa Marina yerlileri için alternatif yaşam yolları veya alanları tasavvur edilir. Yine de, Rachel’in farklı iki mekân arasında yaptığı bu yolculuk, onun farklı yaşam şekillerinin farkına varmasına ve kendi ülkesinin bireylere biçtiği yaşam biçimini ve mekânlarını sorgulamasına yardım eder. Bu sayede, başlarda güçsüz ve kolay teslim olan bilgisiz bir kız olarak yansıtılan Rachel, Santa Marina’daki yeni odasında “iki saatlik alan” kronotopunda, kendisine biçilen dünyasını aşabilir ve kendisini camın dışında gördüğü dünyanın en canlı ve kahraman kişisi olarak görür. Dahası, Londra orta sınıf toplumunun Santa Marina’daki ana merkezi olan otelde düzenlenen partide, kendine has, ilginç piyano performansı ile (Tuan’ın müziğe ve dansa yüklediği, amaca hizmet eden zaman ve mekândan sıyrılabilme özelliği ile yorumlanan) cinsiyet beklentilerini ve davranış geleneklerini de alt üst eder.

İkinci analiz bölümünün son alt başlığında yapılan incelemelerden öne çıkan bulgu, Mrs Dalloway’de karakterlerin, Londra’da dolaştıkları yerlerin ve hikâyelerinin politik olarak kurgulanmasıdır. Londra, kadınlar, erkekler, zenginler ve yoksullar

281 tarafından farklı şekillerde deneyimlenen, kamusal ve özel, kutsal ve sıradan, geçmiş ve bugün gibi ikili ilişkilerle çizilmiş sınırlarla dolu olarak tasvir ediliyor. Buckingham Sarayı, Westminster ve St. Paul Katedrali gibi sembolik otorite ve düzen yerleri, diğer mekânsal birimler veya uygulamalarla birlikte anlatıyı doldurur. Bunların en dikkat çekenlerinden biri Big Ben ve onun bu sıradan Londra gününde karakterlerin hayatlarını hayali bir birlik içinde organize eden vuruşlarıdır. Fakat roman, Londra’nın kamusal alandaki bu sabit, homojen ve mutlak karakterli resmini sürekli kılmaz. St. Margaret’ın annelere atfedilen sevgi ve kucak açıcı özellikleriyle anlatıya katılması Londra’yı karşıt politikaların dinamik bir alanı olarak kurar.

Mrs Dalloway, mekânın dinamik, heterojen ve değişen karakterinin altını çizen; onun statik, mutlak, değişmez ve homojen olarak süregelen anlayışını reddeden bir mekân anlayışını benimser. Böyle bir mekân temsilinin, Lefebvre’in mekânı deneyimlenen ve bu nedenle birey tarafından değiştirilebilen sosyal bir alan olarak inşasını ve Tuan’ın mekânları, insanların anlam yüklemesiyle kurulan ve bu nedenle, bireysel bir deneyimin getirdiği yeni bir anlamla yeniden kurulabilen mekânlar olarak tanımladığı fikirlerini öngördüğü iddia edilebilir. Mrs Dalloway’deki mekân ve yer anlayışı, farklı karakterlerin Londra’da yaptığı bir dizi yürüyüşte gözlemlenebileceği gibi bireysel algı ile yakından bağlantılı bir biçimde şekillendirilmiştir. Her bir yürüyüş, algılayıcının cinsiyetine, sınıfına, milliyetine ve bu faktörlerden kaynaklanan tutum veya endişelerine bağlı olarak şehirdeki mekânlar hakkında benzersiz bir dizi deneyim sunar. Örneğin, Miss Kilman ve Lucrezia gibiler kendilerini umutsuz hissederken ve Londra’nın hareketli sokaklarına ait hissedemezken, Clarissa, Peter ve Elizabeth etraflarında gördükleri canlılığı, umut verici bulurlar. Bu bağlamda, Septimus Londra algısı, Tuan’ın “ayırt edilmemiş mekân” kavramıyla açıklanmıştır. Septimus savaştaki kötü deneyimlerinden kaynaklanan psikolojik problemlerinden dolayı hem şehirden hem de hayattan kopuk hisseder. Aynı sınıfa mensup Clarissa ve Elizabeth bile şehri farklı algılarlar. Clarissa’nın şehirdeki gezisi, toplumsal cinsiyet kodlarının sosyal yapılarında meydana gelen değişiklikleri gösterirken, Elizabeth’in yürüyüşü, genç kadınların geleneksel kadınlık kavramıyla sınırlandırılmayan bağımsızlığının

282 başlangıcını ve erkek egemen kamusal alanlara girişini temsil eder. Bu nedenle, Elizabeth, anlatının kentin erkek egemen alanı olarak aktardığı Strand’ı, kendisini kamu hizmetinde bir kariyer edinerek hayal ettiği liminal bir mekân olarak deneyimlerken resmedilir. Bir diğer dikkat çekici örnekte, Peter, Trafalgar Meydanı’ndaki generallerin heykellerine bakar, ancak sadece kendisini ve Hindistan’da yönettiği sömürge topraklarını görür ki bu, Lefebvre’nin mekânları içiçe kuran, “belirsiz süreklilik” (86-87) kavramına önemli bir örnek teşkil eder. Sonuç olarak, çeşitli karakterlerin farklı algılarıyla aktarılan Londra, anlatının başlıca kahramanı ve bir insan kadar canlı, parçalanmış ve dinamik görülebilir.

Bu tezin bir diğer önemli iddiası da, Mrs Dalloway’in, Clarissa’nın partisi aracılığıyla, sınırların ötesine geçen ve normalde farklı yerleri işgal eden karakterler arasında bağlantılar kuran bir alan yaratmaya çalışmasıdır. Bu partide, farklı yaşam alanlarından karakterler (çoğu alt veya üst-orta sınıf gibi görünse de) bir araya gelerek fikirlerini ifade ederler ve fiziksel olarak, Londra’nın birbirinden farklı bireyleri için yeniden yapılandırılmış bir yerel topluluk ve misafirperverlik alanı (Lady Bruton’un Clarissa’yı çağırmadığı partinin aksine) yaratırlar. Bu çoğulcul ve heterojen atmosfer, aynı zamanda, toplumun dışlanmış üyelerinin seslerinin (başbakanı sıradan bulan Ellie Henderson gibi) duyulmasına ve iktidardaki resmi güçlere meydan okumaya izin verir. Bu bağlamda, partinin düzenlendiği bu domestik alan Lefebvre’nin “farklı bir mekân” (başka bir alan) kavramına örnek olarak görülebilir ve farklılıkları kucaklayıp, mutlak ve bütünleyici mekânsal yapıları reddeder.

Parti farklı bir alan olarak yorumlanabilse bile, partideki katılımcılar, aralarında egemen sosyal sistemler tarafından yaratılan sosyal sınırları gerçekten aşamazlar. Aslında, partinin birlik ve hoşgörü duygularını yakaladığı tek zaman, Clarissa’nın tanımadığı Septimus’un intiharını öğrendikten sonra onunla güçlü bir bağ kurması ve ardından gün boyunca bağlantı kurmaya çalıştığı yalnız yaşlı bir kadınla duygusal bir bağ kurmasıdır. Clarissa Septimus’un ölümünü kendi vücudunda yaşarcasına hayal eder ve oldukça ilginç bir şekilde Septimus’un kendini öldürme sebebini bulur.

283 Bütün bunlar göz önüne alındığında, bu sıradan Londra gününde birbirleriyle karşılaşmadan dolaşan Septimus ile Clarissa’nın aralarında bulunan sınırları aşabilen ve onları birbirine bağlayan tek şey Septimus’un ölümüdür. Bu açıdan, Septimus’un ölümü ile Rachel’in ölümü arasında bir bağ kurulabilir. Londra’nın domestik ve kamusal mekânlarını yeniden inşa edemeyen ve geleneksel kaderini sadece ölümü ile reddedebilen Rachel örneğinde olduğu gibi, Septimus da kendini sadece ölümü aracılığıyla ifade edebilir. Yine de, Clarissa’nın partide Septimus ile kurduğu bu bağ, toplum için değişim olasılığının (farklı cinsiyet, sınıf veya milliyetten insanlar arasında çizilen keskin sınırlarını ortadan kaldırabilen ve bu sınırlardan kaynaklanan ıstırabı, yabancılaşmayı ve duyarsızlığı sona erdirebilen bir toplum) bir önerisi olarak alınabilir. Clarissa, kendisine tahsis edilen domestik mekânda farklı sosyal konumlara sahip insanları bir araya getirerek, birlikte var olma gerçeğini, insanların birbirine bağımlılığını, mekânın inşa edilmiş, heterojen, dinamik ve esnek doğasını ve toplumun mekânsal uygulamalarındaki değişim ihtiyacını gösterir.

Sonuç olarak, The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse ve The Years benlik, zaman ve mekân kavramlarının kurgusal ve değişken yapısını ortaya koyar ki bu, bu romanların mekânsal-zamansal perspektifler ve deneyimlerdeki epistemolojik, fiziksel ve psikolojik değişikliklere tanık olan bir çağdaki deneyimleriyle açıklanabilir. Bu tezin en önemli bulgularından ve belki de eksikliklerinden birini oluşturan şey, bu romanlardaki mekân anlayışı, baskın toplumsal ideolojilere eleştirisini esas olarak var olan yaşam veya mekânsal uygulamalarının üzerine inşa eder. Ne İngiltere’deki ne de başka bir ülkedeki özel veya kamusal mekânların alternatif veya radikal temsillerini (karakterlerin sosyal olarak empoze edilen benliklerini aştığı gösterilen, muhtemelen epifanik “varoluş anları” tarafından tetiklenen birkaç kısa dönüştürücü kronotop dışında –The Voyage Out’daki iki orman sahnesi veya Mrs Dalloway’deki parti sahnesi gibi –) gösterir. Bu bağlamda, sonuçlandırıcı olmaktan çok ilham verme amacını yerine getiren bu tez, Woolf’un diğer romanları üzerinde daha radikal mekânsallaşma temsilleri olup olmadığına dair daha fazla çalışma yapma ihtiyacını ortaya koyuyor. Bu çalışmanın diğer bir zayıf yönü (amacı ve kapsamı göz önüne alındığında daha çok başka bir

284 çalışma alanı önerisi olarak düşünülebilecek bir yanı), modernist roman çalışmalarına katkı sağlayabilecek, mekân, zaman ve beden arasındaki yakın ilişkiyi yeterince inceleyememiş olmasıdır. Esasen amaçlarının ve seçilmiş romanların kısıtlarından kaynaklanan bu eksikliklere rağmen, bu tez, Woolf’un kurgusunun özellikle ataerkilliğe, sınıf odaklı ve emperyalist toplum yapısına yönelik eleştirisini mekânsal yollarıyla yapma açısından zenginliğini ve aynı zamanda benlik, zaman, mekân ve sosyal ilişkilere karşı benimsediği, çoğulluğu kucaklayan dinamik ruhunu görmemizi sağlar. Daha da önemlisi, diğer çalışma alanları tarafından geniş çapta incelenen bu romanların incelenmesinde mekânsal eleştiriyi benimseyerek, edebiyat ve kültürel faaliyetler, ilişkiler ve hayata dair yeni birçok perspektifli bakış açısı sunarak bize bugün yaşadığımız küresel alanların ve yaşamların karmaşıklığı hakkında daha zengin bir bakış açısı kazandırır.

285

C. THESIS PERMISSION FORM / TEZ İZİN FORMU

ENSTİTÜ / INSTITUTE

Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences

Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Social Sciences

Uygulamalı Matematik Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Applied Mathematics

Enformatik Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Informatics

Deniz Bilimleri Enstitüsü / Graduate School of Marine Sciences

YAZARIN / AUTHOR

Soyadı / Surname : Özkaya Adı / Name : Rana Bölümü / Department : İngiliz Edebiyatı / English Literature

TEZİN ADI / TITLE OF THE THESIS (İngilizce / English): Woolf ve Mekân: Virginia Woolf Romanlarında Baskın Sosyo-mekânsal Düzenin Çağdaş Mekânsal Oluşumlarına ve Söylemlerine Karşıt Müdahaleler / Woolf in Space: Subversive Interventions in the Contemporary Spatial Constructions and Discourses of the Dominant Socio-spatial Order in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction

TEZİN TÜRÜ / DEGREE: Yüksek Lisans / Master Doktora / PhD

1. Tezin tamamı dünya çapında erişime açılacaktır. / Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

2. Tez iki yıl süreyle erişime kapalı olacaktır. / Secure the entire work for patent and/or proprietary purposes for a period of two years. *

3. Tez altı ay süreyle erişime kapalı olacaktır. / Secure the entire work for period of six months. *

* Enstitü Yönetim Kurulu kararının basılı kopyası tezle birlikte kütüphaneye teslim edilecektir. / A copy of the decision of the Institute Administrative Committee will be delivered to the library together with the printed thesis.

Yazarın imzası / Signature ...... Tarih / Date ...... (Kütüphaneye teslim ettiğiniz tarih. Elle doldurulacaktır.) (Library submission date. Please fill out by hand.) Tezin son sayfasıdır. / This is the last page of the thesis/dissertation.

286